Istio mode

Gloo Mesh Enterprise supports Istio service meshes that run in sidecar mode.

Istio modeMaturityLifecycle optionsSolo distributions of Istio?Feature highlights
Sidecar (default)ProductionGloo-managed, manual, takeover existing installationsYesDeploy your service mesh with the standard sidecar approach. Although this approach is more resource-intensive, you get more observability data because all network traffic stays on Layer 7. To get started, see Deploy Gloo-managed service meshes and Install Istio service meshes with Helm.



Istio image

Gloo Mesh Enterprise supports Istio service meshes that run either community Istio images or Solo distributions of Istio. The Solo distribution of Istio is a hardened Istio enterprise image, which maintains n-4 support for CVEs and other security fixes. The image support timeline is longer than the community Istio support timeline, which provides n-1 support with an additional 6 weeks of extended time to upgrade the n-2 version to n-1. For more about the added benefits of Solo distributions of Istio and to review the available image distributions, see Solo distributions of Istio.

Lifecycle management

Gloo Mesh Enterprise supports full service mesh lifecycle management with the Gloo operator. By using the Gloo operator to manage your service meshes, you no longer need to manually install and manage the istiod control plane. Instead, you provide minimal Istio configuration to the operator in a ServiceMeshController custom resource, and the operator translates this configuration into a managed istiod control plane in your cluster for you. The operator reduces both the amount of configuration required to deploy Istio, and the overhead required to manage the lifecycle of Istio resources in your cluster.