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Set up Gloo Mesh

Securely connect and observe your Istio microservices in your single cluster environment with Gloo Mesh.

Gloo Mesh Enterprise is a service mesh management plane that is based on hardened, open-source projects like Envoy and Istio. With Gloo Mesh, you can unify the configuration, operation, and visibility of service-to-service connectivity across your distributed applications. These apps can run in different virtual machines (VMs) or Kubernetes clusters on premises or in various cloud providers, and even in different service meshes.

You can follow this guide to quickly get started with Gloo Mesh Enterprise. To learn more about the benefits and architecture, see About. To customize your installation with Helm instead, see the advanced installation guide.

Before you begin

Install the following command-line (CLI) tools.
- kubectl, the Kubernetes command line tool. Download the kubectl version that is within one minor version of the Kubernetes clusters you plan to use.
- meshctl, the Solo command line tool.
```
  curl -sL https://run.solo.io/meshctl/install | GLOO_MESH_VERSION=v2.9.0-beta0 sh -
export PATH=$HOME/.gloo-mesh/bin:$PATH
  
```
- helm, the Kubernetes package manager.
Create or use an existing Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster, and save the cluster name in an environment variable. Note: The cluster name must be alphanumeric with no special characters except a hyphen (-), lowercase, and begin with a letter (not a number).
```
  export CLUSTER_NAME=<cluster_name>
  
```
Set your Gloo Mesh Enterprise license key as an environment variable. If you do not have one, contact an account representative. If you prefer to specify license keys in a secret instead, see Licensing. To check your license’s validity, you can run meshctl license check --key $(echo ${GLOO_MESH_LICENSE_KEY} | base64 -w0).
```
  export GLOO_MESH_LICENSE_KEY=<license_key>
  
```

Install Gloo Mesh Enterprise

Install Gloo Mesh Enterprise in your cluster. This command uses basic profiles to install the management plane components, such as the management server and Prometheus server, and the data plane components, such as the agent, rate limit server, and external auth server, in your cluster.

  meshctl install --profiles gloo-mesh-enterprise-single,ratelimit,extauth \
  --set common.cluster=${CLUSTER_NAME} \
  --set glooMgmtServer.createGlobalWorkspace=true \
  --set licensing.glooMeshLicenseKey=${GLOO_MESH_LICENSE_KEY}

  meshctl install --profiles gloo-mesh-enterprise-single-openshift,ratelimit,extauth \
  --set common.cluster=${CLUSTER_NAME} \
  --set glooMgmtServer.createGlobalWorkspace=true \
  --set licensing.glooMeshLicenseKey=${GLOO_MESH_LICENSE_KEY}

Verify that your Gloo Mesh Enterprise setup is correctly installed. If not, try debugging the relay connection. Note that this check might take a few seconds to verify that:

Your Gloo product license is valid and current.
The Gloo CRDs are installed at the correct version.
The management plane pods are running and healthy.

  meshctl check

Example output:

  🟢 License status

INFO  gloo-mesh enterprise license expiration is 25 Aug 26 10:38 CDT

🟢 CRD version check 

🟢 Gloo deployment status

Namespace | Name                           | Ready | Status
gloo-mesh | ext-auth-service               | 1/1   | Healthy
gloo-mesh | gloo-mesh-agent                | 1/1   | Healthy
gloo-mesh | gloo-mesh-mgmt-server          | 1/1   | Healthy
gloo-mesh | gloo-mesh-redis                | 1/1   | Healthy
gloo-mesh | gloo-mesh-ui                   | 1/1   | Healthy
gloo-mesh | gloo-telemetry-collector-agent | 3/3   | Healthy
gloo-mesh | prometheus-server              | 1/1   | Healthy
gloo-mesh | rate-limiter                   | 1/1   | Healthy
  
🟢 Mgmt server connectivity to workload agents

Cluster | Registered | Connected Pod                                   
test    | true       | gloo-mesh/gloo-mesh-mgmt-server-558cddbbd7-rf2hv

Connected Pod                                    | Clusters
gloo-mesh/gloo-mesh-mgmt-server-558cddbbd7-rf2hv | 1

Optional: Check out the workspace and workspace settings that were created for you. Workspaces help to organize team resources in your cluster, and to isolate Kubernetes and Gloo resources. Because the default workspace is used for demonstration purposes, it does not isolate any resources, and instead allows all Kubernetes and Gloo resources in the workspace.
```
  kubectl get workspace ${CLUSTER_NAME} -n gloo-mesh -o yaml
  
```
```
  kubectl get workspacesettings default -n gloo-mesh -o yaml
  
```

Deploy Istio

Check whether an Istio control plane already exists.

  kubectl get pods -n istio-system

If an istiod pod exists, such as in this example output, you already installed an Istio control plane. Continue to the next step.

  NAME                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
istiod-b65676555-g2vmr     1/1     Running   0          57s

If no istiod pod exists, you can use the Gloo Operator to install a service mesh. Note that this installs a minimal service mesh setup to get you started. For a more advanced Istio sidecar installation, check out the service mesh installation guides.

Install the Gloo Operator to the gloo-mesh namespace. This operator deploys and manages your Istio installation.

  helm install gloo-operator oci://us-docker.pkg.dev/solo-public/gloo-operator-helm/gloo-operator \
  --version 0.2.3 \
  -n gloo-mesh \
  --create-namespace \
  --set manager.env.SOLO_ISTIO_LICENSE_KEY=${GLOO_MESH_LICENSE_KEY}

Verify that the operator pod is running.

  kubectl get pods -n gloo-mesh -l app.kubernetes.io/name=gloo-operator

Example output:

  gloo-operator-78d58d5c7b-lzbr5     1/1     Running   0          48s

Create a ServiceMeshController custom resource to configure an Istio installation. For a description of each configurable field, see the ServiceMeshController reference. If you need to set more advanced Istio configuration, you can also create a gloo-extensions-config configmap. Note that the operator detects your cloud provider and cluster platform, and configures the necessary settings required for that platform for you. For example, if you create an ambient mesh in an OpenShift cluster, no OpenShift-specific settings are required in the ServiceMeshController, because the operator automatically sets the appropriate settings for OpenShift and your specific cloud provider accordingly.

If you set the installNamespace to a namespace other than gloo-system, gloo-mesh, or istio-system, you must include the –set manager.env.WATCH_NAMESPACES=<namespace> setting.
```
  kubectl apply -n gloo-mesh -f -<<EOF
apiVersion: operator.gloo.solo.io/v1
kind: ServiceMeshController
metadata:
  name: managed-istio
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: managed-istio
spec:
  dataplaneMode: Sidecar
  installNamespace: istio-system
  version: 1.25.2
EOF
  
```

Verify that the istiod control plane and Istio CNI pods are running. Because the CNI are deployed as daemon sets, the number of CNI pods each equal the number of nodes in your cluster. Note that it might take a few seconds for the pods to become available.

  kubectl get pods -n istio-system

Example output:

  NAME                          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
istio-cni-node-6s5nk          1/1     Running   0          2m53s
istio-cni-node-blpz4          1/1     Running   0          2m53s
istiod-gloo-bb86b959f-msrg7   1/1     Running   0          2m45s
istiod-gloo-bb86b959f-w29cm   1/1     Running   0          3m

Deploy sample apps to try out the routing capabilities and traffic policies in Gloo Mesh.

Understand what happened

Find out more information about the Gloo Mesh Enterprise environment that you set up in this guide.

Gloo Mesh Enterprise installation: This quick start guide used meshctl to install a minimum deployment of Gloo Mesh Enterprise for testing purposes, and some optional components are not installed. For more information, check out the CLI install profiles. To learn more about production-level installation options, including advanced configuration options available in the Gloo Helm chart, see the advanced installation guide.

Management server and agent: When you installed the Gloo management plane, a deployment named gloo-mesh-mgmt-server was created to translate and implement your Gloo configurations. As you create service mesh configurations, the management components translate your Gloo configurations into Istio resources that are implemented in the service mesh. The management plane also aggregates all of the discovered Istio service mesh components into simplified, internal Gloo custom resources. Additionally, because the glooAgent.enabled: true setting is included in the gloo-gateway-single install profile, the cluster was also registered to be managed by Gloo. The deployment named gloo-mesh-agent was created to run the Gloo agent as part of the Gloo data plane.

Relay architecture: When you installed Gloo Mesh Enterprise, the connection between the Gloo management server and agent was secured by using simple TLS with a self-signed TLS certificate that the Gloo management server uses to prove its identity to the Gloo agent. To establish initial trust, the agent uses the relay identity token that you provided during the installation. To learn more about other options to secure the relay connection, see Setup options. In a multicluster setup, the Gloo agent discovers Gloo and Kubernetes resources, such as deployments and services, and sends snapshots of them to the management server for translation and implementation. However, in a single cluster setup, your resources are written directly to the cluster without relay. For more information about relay server-agent communication, see the relay architecture page.

Istio installation: The Istio service mesh in this getting started guide was installed by using Helm. However, Gloo Mesh can discover Istio service meshes regardless of their installation options. For more information, check out the Gloo Mesh Enterprise guides for installing and managing Istio.

Gloo workspace: Gloo workspaces let you organize team resources across Kubernetes namespaces and clusters. In this example, a single workspace is created for everything. Later, as your teams grow, you can create a workspace for each team, to enforce service isolation, set up federation, and even share resources by importing and exporting. You can also change the default workspace by following the Workspace setup guide.

Set up Gloo Mesh

Before you begin link

Install Gloo Mesh Enterprise link

Deploy Istio link

Next link

Understand what happened link

Before you begin

Install Gloo Mesh Enterprise

Deploy Istio

Next

Understand what happened