System requirements
Review the following minimum requirements and other recommendations for your Gloo Mesh Gateway setup.
Number of clusters
Single-cluster: Gloo Mesh Gateway 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 Gateway setup consists of one management cluster that the Gloo Mesh Gateway 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
Review the following recommendations and considerations when creating clusters for your Gloo Mesh Gateway environment.
Supported platforms
Gloo Mesh Gateway 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 througout 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
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$CLUSTER_NAMEenvironment variable, and the context of your cluster in the$MGMT_CONTEXTenvironment variable. - Multicluster: When a guide requires example names, the examples use
mgmt,cluster1, andcluster2. Otherwise, you can save the names of your clusters in the$MGMT_CLUSTER,$REMOTE_CLUSTER1, and$REMOTE_CLUSTER2environment variables, and the contexts of your clusters in the$MGMT_CONTEXT,$REMOTE_CONTEXT1, and$REMOTE_CONTEXT2environment variables.
Size and memory
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 database work together to maintain the desired state of your environment.
Demos, POCs, and non-production testing environments
Review the following table of suggestions for sizing non-production environments, such as for development, demos, or proofs of concept (POCs).
| Your environment | Gloo management cluster | Gloo workload cluster | Redis for management plane |
|---|---|---|---|
Minimum setup for POCs, such as:
| 4 vCPU and 8 GB memory | 2 vCPU and 8 GB memory | General cache.m7g.large, 2 vCPU and 8 GiB memory |
Larger POCs, such as:
| 8 vCPU and 16 GB memory | 4 vCPU and 16 GB memory | General cache.m7g.large, 2 vCPU and 8 GiB memory |
Production environments
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.
Your environment* | Management cluster instances | Gloo management server† | Gloo agent | Redis for management plane‡ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Small
|
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Medium
|
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Large
|
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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 Bring your own Redis instance provider considerations.
Version
The following versions of Gloo Mesh Gateway 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 Gateway might also work, but are not tested as part of the Gloo Mesh Gateway release.
| Gloo Mesh Gateway | Release date | Supported Solo distributions of Istio and related Kubernetes versions tested by Solo | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2.6 | TBD |
| |
| 2.5 | 09 Jan 2024 |
| |
| 2.4 | 28 Aug 2023 |
| |
| 2.3 | 17 Apr 2023 |
| |
| 2.2 | 20 Jan 2023 |
|
Load balancer connectivity
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
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 Gateway 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
Required
In your firewall or network rules for the management cluster, open the following required ports and repositories.
| Name | Port | Protocol | Source | Destination | Network | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agent communication | 9900 | TCP | ClusterIPs of agents on workload clusters | IP addresses of management cluster nodes | Cluster network | Allow the gloo-mesh-agent on each workload cluster to send data to the gloo-mesh-mgmt-server in the management cluster. |
| Management server images | - | - | IP addresses of management cluster nodes | https://gcr.io/gloo-mesh | Public | Allow installation and updates of the gloo-mesh image in the management cluster. |
| Redis image | - | - | IP addresses of management cluster nodes | docker.io/redis | Public | Allow installation of the Redis image in the management cluster to store OIDC ID tokens for the Gloo UI. |
Optional
In your firewall or network rules for the management cluster, open the following optional ports as needed.
| Name | Port | Protocol | Source | Destination | Network | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Healthchecks | 8090 | TCP | Check initiator | IP addresses of management cluster nodes | Public or cluster network, depending on whether checks originate from outside or inside service mesh | Allow healthchecks to the management server. |
| OpenTelemetry gateway | 4317 | TCP | OpenTelemetry agent | IP addresses of management cluster nodes | Public | Collect telemetry data, such as metrics, logs, and traces to show in Gloo observability tools. |
| Other tools | - | - | - | - | Public | For any other tools that you use in your Gloo environment, consult the tool’s documentation to ensure that you allow the correct ports. For example, if you use tools such as cert-manager to generate and manage the Gloo certificates for your setup, consult the cert-manager platform reference. |
Workload clusters
Required
In your firewall or network rules for the workload clusters, open the following required ports and repositories.
| Name | Port | Protocol | Source | Destination | Network | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agent image | - | - | IP addresses of workload cluster nodes | https://gcr.io/gloo-mesh | Public | Allow installation and updates of the gloo-mesh image in workload clusters. |
| Ingress gateway | 80 and/or 443 | HTTP, HTTPS | - | Gateway load balancer IP address | Public or private network | Allow incoming traffic requests to the Istio ingress gateway. |
Optional
In your firewall or network rules for the workload clusters, open the following optional ports as needed.
| Name | Port | Protocol | Source | Destination | Network | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agent healthchecks | 8090 | TCP | Check initiator | IP addresses of workload cluster nodes | Public or cluster network, depending on whether checks originate from outside or inside service mesh | Allow healthchecks to the Gloo agent. |
| Envoy telemetry | 15090 | HTTP | Scraper | IP addresses of workload cluster nodes | Public | Scrape your Prometheus metrics from a different server, or a similar metrics setup. |
| Istio Pilot | 15017 | HTTPS | IP addresses of workload cluster nodes | - | Public | Depending on your cloud provider, you might need to open ports to install Istio. For example, in GKE clusters, you must open port 15017 for the Pilot discovery validation webhook. For more ports and requirements, see Ports used by Istio. |
| Istio healthchecks | 15021 | HTTP | Check initiator | IP addresses of workload cluster nodes | Public or cluster network, depending on whether checks originate from outside or inside service mesh | Allow healthchecks on path /healthz/ready. |
| Solo distributions of Istio | - | - | IP addresses of workload cluster nodes | A repo key for a Solo distribution of Istio that you can get by logging in to the Support Center and reviewing the Istio images built by Solo.io support article | Public | Allow installation and updates of the Solo distribution of Istio in workload clusters. |
Port and repo access from local systems
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/installto install themeshctlCLI tool. - Allow access to the Gloo Helm respository,
https://storage.googleapis.com/gloo-platform/helm-charts, to install Gloo Mesh Gateway via thehelmCLI.
Reserved ports and pod requirements
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.