System requirements

Number of clusters link

Single-cluster: Gloo Mesh Enterprise is fully functional when the management plane (management server) and data plane (agent and service mesh) both run within the same cluster. You can easily install both the control and data plane components by using one installation process. If you choose to install the components in separate processes, ensure that you use the same name for the cluster during both processes.

Multicluster: A multicluster Gloo Mesh Enterprise setup consists of one management cluster that the Gloo Mesh Enterprise management server is installed in, and one or more workload clusters that serves as the data plane (agent and service mesh). By running the management plane in a dedicated management cluster, you can ensure that no workload pods consume cluster resources that might impede management processes. Many guides throughout the documentation use one management cluster and two workload clusters as an example setup.

Cluster details link

Review the following recommendations and considerations when creating clusters for your Gloo Mesh Enterprise environment.

Supported platforms link

Gloo Mesh Enterprise is supported on the following platforms:

• Kubernetes
• OpenShift: Some changes are required to allow Istio to run on OpenShift clusters. To make these changes, use commands throughout the installation guides that are labeled for use with OpenShift. For more information, see Installation options.

Note that in multicluster setups, you can use both Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters.

Note: Be sure to verify that your cluster’s Kubernetes or Openshift version is supported for Gloo.

Name link

The cluster name must be alphanumeric with no special characters except a hyphen (-), lowercase, and begin with a letter (not a number).

Cluster context names cannot include underscores. The generated certificate that connects workload clusters to the management cluster uses the context name as a SAN specification, and underscores in SAN are not FQDN compliant. You can rename a context by running kubectl config rename-context "<oldcontext>" <newcontext>.

Throughout the guides in this documentation, examples use a single-cluster setup and a three-cluster setup.

• Single-cluster: When a guide requires an example name, the examples use mgmt. Otherwise, you can save the name of your cluster in the $CLUSTER_NAME environment variable, and the context of your cluster in the $MGMT_CONTEXT environment variable.
• Multicluster: When a guide requires example names, the examples use mgmt, cluster1, and cluster2. Otherwise, you can save the names of your clusters in the $MGMT_CLUSTER, $REMOTE_CLUSTER1, and $REMOTE_CLUSTER2 environment variables, and the contexts of your clusters in the $MGMT_CONTEXT, $REMOTE_CONTEXT1, and $REMOTE_CONTEXT2 environment variables.

Size and memory link

The following tables suggest minimum vCPU and memory sizes for the Gloo and Redis components of the management plane, depending on the size of your environment. If you find that the Gloo management server translation time is continuously above 60s in your environment, you can try to improve the performance by allocating more CPU and memory resources to the Gloo management server.

For more information, see the following resources:

• Relay architecture, which explains how the management server, agent, and backing Redis instance work together to maintain the desired state of your environment.
• Scalability reference, which explains other factors that impact performance at scale, such as the number of workspaces or virtual destinations.

Demos, POCs, and non-production testing environments link

Review the following table of suggestions for sizing non-production environments, such as for development, demos, or proofs of concept (POCs).

Production environments link

Review the following table of suggestions for sizing production environments. The table is organized into three general sizes based on the number of clusters and resources that you have.

Notes on the table:

* Your environment: A service is 1 Kubernetes service in a single cluster. For high availability and multicluster communication, services are translated across clusters. For example, if you have 100 Kubernetes services in a single cluster, and 10 workload clusters, then your total number of services is 1,000. To manage services more efficiently for translation, create workspaces. Then, export and import only the services that you need across workspaces.

† Gloo management server: To improve translation performance, you can run multiple replicas of the Gloo management server. This horizontal scaling shards and runs translation in parallel. However, horizontal scaling does not evenly distribute the compute load among replicas. Instead, horizontal scaling improves translation performance at a 1:1 ratio cost of resource utilization. At scale, such increased cost impacts mostly the size of the memory, because each management server replica maintains a global snapshot of the entire environment in-memory. As such, the suggested memory sizes increase at a higher ratio than the vCPUs as your environment scales.

‡ Redis for management plane: The sizing suggestions in the table are based off AWS ElastiCache node types and their corresponding AWS EC2 instance types. If you use a different Redis-compatible provider, try to use a comparable instance size. For more Redis deployment considerations, see the Backing Redis databases guide.

Version link

The following versions of Gloo Mesh Enterprise are supported with the compatible open source project versions of Istio and Kubernetes. Later versions of the open source projects that are released after Gloo Mesh Enterprise might also work, but are not tested as part of the Gloo Mesh Enterprise release.

Feature gates link

To review the required Gloo Mesh Enterprise versions for specific features that you can optionally enable, see Feature gates.

For more information, see Supported versions.

Load balancer connectivity link

If you use an Istio ingress gateway and want to test connectivity through it in your Gloo environment, ensure that your cluster setup enables you to externally access LoadBalancer services on the workload clusters.

Port and repo access from cluster networks link

If you have restrictions for your cluster networks in your cloud infrastructure provider, you must open ports, protocols, and image repositories to install Gloo Mesh Enterprise and to allow your Gloo installation to communicate with the Solo APIs. For example, you might have firewall rules set up on the public network of your clusters so that they do not have default access to all public endpoints. The following sections detail the required and optional ports and repositories that your management and workload clusters must access.

Management cluster link

Required link

In your firewall or network rules for the management cluster, open the following required ports and repositories.

Optional link

In your firewall or network rules for the management cluster, open the following optional ports as needed.

Workload clusters link

Required link

In your firewall or network rules for the workload clusters, open the following required ports and repositories.

Optional link

In your firewall or network rules for the workload clusters, open the following optional ports as needed.

Port and repo access from local systems link

If corporate network policies prevent access from your local system to public endpoints via proxies or firewall rules:

• Allow access to https://run.solo.io/meshctl/install to install the meshctl CLI tool.
• Allow access to the Gloo Helm repository, https://storage.googleapis.com/gloo-platform/helm-charts, to install Gloo Mesh Enterprise via the helm CLI.

Reserved ports and pod requirements link

Review the following service mesh and platform docs that outline what ports are reserved, so that you do not use these ports for other functions in your apps. You might use other services such as a database or application monitoring tool that reserve additional ports.

• Istio
• Kubernetes
• OpenShift

Considerations for running Cilium and Istio on EKS link

If you plan to run Istio with sidecar injection and the Cilium CNI in tunneling mode (VXLAN or GENEVE) on an Amazon EKS cluster, the Istio control plane istiod is not reachable by the Kubernetes API server by default.

Istio uses Kubernetes admission webhooks to inject sidecar proxies into pods. In EKS environments, the Cilium CNI cannot run on the same nodes where the Kubernetes API server is deployed to, which leads to communication issues when trying to inject Istio sidecars into pods.

You can choose from the following options to allow istiod to communicate with the Kubernetes API server:

• Configure istiod with direct access to the networking stack of the underlying host node by setting hostNetwork to true as shown in the following Istio Lifecycle Manager example:

    # Traffic management
      components:
        pilot:
          k8s:
            overlays:
              - kind: Deployment
                name: istiod-1-25
                patches:
                  - path: spec.template.spec.hostNetwork
                    value: true 
    

• Chain the Cilium CNI with the aws-vpc-cni. For more information, see the Cilium documentation.
• Choose a different Cilium routing mode instead, such as eBPF-based routing. For more information about available modes, see the Cilium documentation.
• Consider running Istio in ambient mode. For more information, see Beta: Ambient mesh.