Supported policies in Gloo Mesh

Find an overview of supported policies in Gloo Mesh and why you want to use them.

Gloo Mesh supports a variety of policies to ensure network resiliency, traffic control, security, and observability for the microservices in your service mesh. Flip through the cards to learn about what policies are supported, why you want to use them, and what Gloo Mesh resource the policy can be applied to. To see an example policy setup, simply follow the links.

Name	Type	Description	Applied to	Solo distribution of Istio required?
Adaptive request concurrency	Client-side	Dynamically adjust the maximum number of concurrent requests that can be sent to a destination.	Destination	Yes
Failover	Client-side	Use a failover policy to determine where to reroute traffic in case of failure. For example, you can set up a failover policy to route traffic from one availability zone or region to another if that zone or region becomes unavailable.	Destination	No
Fault injection	Client-side	Test the resilience of your apps by injecting delays and connection failures. With fault injections, you intentionally introduce errors, such as a failure of an upstream dependency to see how your app behaves and if it can recover from such an event.	Route	No
Outlier detection	Client-side	Configure Gloo to remove unhealthy destinations from the connection pool, and add the destinations back when they become healthy again. An outlier can be any upstream app instance that is performing differently than other instances that back the Kubernetes service, Gloo Mesh virtual destination, or external service. For example, if an app instance responds with a 5xx HTTP error code most of the time, it is excluded from the Gloo Mesh load balancing.	Destination	No
Retry	Client-side	Use retry settings to specify the maximum number of times a service mesh proxy can attempt to call a service in the mesh after the initial call failed.	Route	No
Timeout	Client-side	With timeouts, you can specify how long the service mesh proxy waits for a service or host to respond before it is considered unavailable.	Route	No
TCP connection	Client-side	Set up connection pool settings for a TCP destination, such as TCP keepalive.	Destination	No
Trim proxy config	Client-side	Trim the number of destinations in the Istio sidecar proxy configuration for your workloads to avoid memory pressure issues.	Workload	No

Name	Type	Description	Applied to	Solo distribution of Istio required?
Header manipulation	Client-side	Append or remove HTTP request and response headers at the route level.	Route	No
Load balancer and consitent hash	Client-side	Specify how you want Istio to select an upstream service to serve an incoming client request.	Destination	No
Mirroring	Client-side	Duplicate outgoing traffic, to test a new app. Mirroring, also referred to as shadowing, can be very useful if you want to send live traffic to a different version of your app to verify the app’s behavior or set up canary testing.	Route	No
Rate limiting	Client-side	Control the rate of requests to destinations within the service mesh. With rate limits, you can specify how many requests you want to allow to be passed to a particular service in a certain timeframe. For example, you might want to limit your service to receive only one request per second.	Route or destination	Yes
Transformation	Client-side	Alter a request before matching and routing, such as with an Inja header template. For example, you might want to add or remove certain headers from the request or response that is routed in your service mesh.	Route	Yes

Name	Type	Description	Applied to	Solo distribution of Istio required?
Access policies	Server-side	Control access for workloads in your service mesh.	Workload or destination	No
CORS	Client-side	Enforce client-site access controls with cross-origin resource sharing (CORS). CORS is a browser mechanism that allows a client web app to access resources that are located outside of a specific domain.	Route	No
JWT	Client-side	Control access or route traffic based on verified claims in a JSON web token (JWT).. Note: Applying a JWT policy to ingress routes requires a Gloo Gateway license.	Route or destination	Yes
External authentication and authorization	Client-side	Set up an external authentication and authorization to protect the workloads in your cluster. For example, you can set up basic, passthrough, API key, OAuth, OPA, or LDAP authentication.	Route or destination	Yes

Name	Type	Description	Applied to
Certificate Authority options	Client-side	Create a policy for custom CA certificates.
Vault	Client-side	Create a policy for Vault-managed certificates.

Name	Type	Description	Applied to	Solo distribution of Istio required?
WASM	Server-side	Add a Wasm filter to the Envoy sidecar proxy, for use cases such as customizing the endpoints and thresholds for your workloads.	Workload	No

You can use the following policies to control traffic through the ingress gateway in north-south scenarios.

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To use this feature, you must have a Gloo Gateway license in addition to your Gloo Mesh license.

Name	Type	Description	Applied to	Solo distribution of Istio required?
Active healthcheck	Client-side	Use the ingress gateway to periodically check the health of an upstream service in your cluster.	Destination	No
Client TLS	Client-side	Enable TLS origination for your ingress gateway so that you can encrypt requests before they are forwarded to HTTPS services in your cluster.	Destination	No
CSRF	Client-side	Apply a CSRF filter to the gateway to help prevent cross-site request forgery attacks. A cross-site request forgery attack is a web security vulnerability where the attacker induces an authenticated user to perform an unwanted action on a trusted site.	Route	No
DLP	Client-side	Ensure that sensitive data isn’t logged or leaked with Data Loss Prevention (DLP).	Route	Yes
GraphQL allowed queries	Client-side	Prevent malicious requests to your GraphQL servers by specifying allowed queries. The GraphQL server returns an error for queries with hashes that are not in the list of allowed hashes.	Route	Yes
GraphQL query caching	Client-side	Improve network performance by caching GraphQL queries. The query string and the query’s SHA-256 hash that are cached on the GraphQL server side, so that clients can send the query hash instead of the larger query string.	Route	Yes
HTTP buffer filter	Client-side	Set the maximum request body size that you want to accept for a particular workload in your cluster.	Route	No
JWT	Client-side	Control access or route traffic based on verified claims in a JSON web token (JWT). Note: You only need a Gloo Gateway license to apply JWT policies to ingress routes. For internal mesh traffic, you can apply JWTs to destinations or east-west routes with only a Gloo Mesh Enterprise license.	Route	Yes
Listener connection	Client-side	Configure connection settings between downstream services and a gateway listener.	Listener	No
Proxy protocol	Client-side	Preserve connection information such as the client IP address for traffic that goes through your gateway listener.	Listener	No
WAF	Client-side	Filter, monitor, and block potentially harmful HTTP traffic with a Web Application Firewall (WAF) policy.	Route	Yes