Route to external services

Enable services in your service mesh to route to endpoints that are located outside the service mesh.

In some cases, one of your Istio-managed apps might need to communicate with services that are external to the service mesh. For example, your app might need to contact a public API or an on-prem database. If you installed Istio with the REGISTRY_ONLY option, communication is allowed only between services in the mesh. Communication to services outside the mesh is prohibited. To allow services in the mesh to talk to services outside the mesh, you can leverage Gloo ExternalService and ExternalEndpoint custom resources. Gloo Mesh translates these resources into an Istio ServiceEntry.

To learn more about how to set up routing to external services, see the following guides:

For more information about external services and external endpoints, see the following resources: