Gloo Mesh Gateway is a feature-rich, Kubernetes-native ingress controller and next-generation API gateway. With Gloo Mesh Gateway, you have access to its exceptional function-level routing, discovery capabilities, numerous features, tight integration with leading open-source projects, and support for legacy apps, microservices, and serverless. Gloo Mesh Gateway is uniquely designed to support hybrid applications in which multiple technologies, architectures, protocols, and clouds can coexist. To learn more about the benefits and architecture, see About.

Overview

In this guide, you customize Helm settings for an advanced Gloo Mesh Gateway installation in a single-cluster environment. To use a dedicated cluster for your Gloo management plane, and install gateway proxies in one or more workload clusters instead, see the multicluster setup guide.

These settings install the Gloo management plane and gateway proxy together in one cluster, as shown in the following diagram.

  • Gloo Mesh Gateway management plane: When you install the Gloo management plane, a deployment named gloo-mesh-mgmt-server is created to translate and implement your Gloo configurations. Because you include the glooAgent.enabled: true setting in the installation values file, the cluster is also registered to be managed by Gloo. A deployment named gloo-mesh-agent is created to run the Gloo agent as part of the Gloo data plane.
  • Gateway proxy: Use the Gloo management plane to install an ingress gateway proxy in your cluster, as part of the Istio lifecycle management. By using a Gloo-managed installation, you no longer need to manually install and manage the istiod control plane and gateway proxy. Instead, you provide the Istio configuration in your gloo-platform Helm chart, and Gloo translates this configuration into a managed istiod control plane and gateway proxy in the cluster.

Figure: Gloo Mesh Gateway single-cluster installation architecture
Figure: Gloo Mesh Gateway single-cluster installation architecture

Before you begin

  1. 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=v2.5.11 sh -
      export PATH=$HOME/.gloo-mesh/bin:$PATH
        
    • helm, the Kubernetes package manager.
  2. Set your Gloo Mesh Gateway 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_GATEWAY_LICENSE_KEY} | base64 -w0).

      export GLOO_MESH_GATEWAY_LICENSE_KEY=<license_key>
      
  3. Set the Gloo Mesh Gateway version. This example uses the latest version. You can find other versions in the Changelog documentation. Append -fips for a FIPS-compliant image, such as 2.5.11-fips. Do not include v before the version number.

      export GLOO_VERSION=2.5.11
      
  4. 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>
      
  5. Production installations: Review Best practices for production to prepare your optional security measures. For example, before you begin your Gloo installation, you can provide your own certificates to secure the management server and agent connection, and set up secure access to the Gloo UI.
  6. Running your own Prometheus server: In Gloo version 2.5.0, the prometheus.io/port: "<port_number>" annotation was removed from the Gloo management server and agent. However, the prometheus.io/scrape: true annotation is still present. If you have another Prometheus instance that runs in your cluster, and it is not set up with custom scraping jobs for the Gloo management server and agent, the instance automatically scrapes all ports on the management server and agent pods. This can lead to error messages in the management server and agent logs. Note that this issue is resolved in version 2.5.2. To view your options to resolve this issue, see Run another Prometheus instance alongside the built-in one. Note that this issue is resolved in version 2.5.2.

Install Gloo Mesh Gateway

  1. Add and update the Helm repository for Gloo.

      helm repo add gloo-platform https://storage.googleapis.com/gloo-platform/helm-charts
    helm repo update
      
  2. Install the Gloo CRDs.

      helm upgrade -i gloo-platform-crds gloo-platform/gloo-platform-crds \
       --namespace=gloo-mesh \
       --create-namespace \
       --version=$GLOO_VERSION
      
  3. Prepare a Helm values file to provide your customizations. To get started, you can use the minimum settings in the following profile as a basis. These settings enable all components that are required for a single-cluster Gloo Mesh Gateway installation.

  4. Decide how you want to secure the relay connection between the Gloo management server and agent. In test and POC environments, you can use Gloo self-signed certificates to secure the connection. If you plan to use Gloo Mesh Gateway in production, it is recommended to bring your own certificates instead. For more information, see Setup options.

  5. Edit the file to provide your own details for settings that are recommended for production deployments, such as the following settings.

    FieldDecription
    glooAgent.resources.limitsAdd resource limits for the gloo-mesh-agent pod, such as cpu: 500m and memory: 512Mi.
    glooMgmtServer.resources.limitsAdd resource limits for the gloo-mesh-mgmt-server pod, such as cpu: 1000m and memory: 1Gi.
    glooMgmtServer.safeMode
    glooMgmtServer.safeStartWindow
    Configure how you want the Gloo management server to handle translation after a Redis restart. For available options, see Redis safe mode options.
    glooMgmtServer.serviceOverrides.metadata.annotationsAdd annotations for the management server load balancer as needed, such as AWS-specific load balancer annotations. For more information, see Deployment and service overrides.
    glooUi.authSet up OIDC authorization for the Gloo UI. For more information, see UI authentication.
    extAuthService.enabledSet to true to install the external auth server add-on.
    istioInstallationsThe default supported version of Istio is used to install the managed gateway proxies. You can instead choose the Istio version you want to use for your gateway proxy. For an example of how this section might look, see Example istioInstallations settings.
    NOTE: To manage the gateway proxies yourself instead of the gateway lifecycle manager in this Helm chart, set istioInstallations.enabled to false, and manually deploy gateway proxies.
    prometheus.enabledDisable the default Prometheus instance as needed to provide your own. Otherwise, you can keep the default Prometheus server enabled, and deploy a production-level server to scrape metrics from the server. For more information on each option, see Best practices for collecting metrics in production.
    rateLimiter.enabledSet to true to install the rate limit server add-on.
    redisDisable the default Redis deployment and provide your own backing database as needed. For more information, see Backing databases.
    OpenShift: glooMgmtServer.serviceType and telemetryGateway.service.typeIn some OpenShift setups, you might not use load balancer service types. You can set these two deployment service types to ClusterIP, and expose them by using OpenShift routes after installation.
  6. Use the customizations in your Helm values file to install the Gloo Mesh Gateway components in your cluster.

  7. Create a workspace that selects all clusters and namespaces by default, and workspace settings that enable communication across clusters. Gloo workspaces let you organize team resources across Kubernetes namespaces and clusters. In this example, you create a global workspace that imports and exports all resources and namespaces, and a workspace settings resource in the gloo-mesh-config namespace. 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.

      kubectl apply --context $MGMT_CONTEXT -f- <<EOF
    apiVersion: admin.gloo.solo.io/v2
    kind: Workspace
    metadata:
      name: $MGMT_CLUSTER
      namespace: gloo-mesh
    spec:
      workloadClusters:
        - name: '*'
          namespaces:
            - name: '*'
    ---
    apiVersion: v1
    kind: Namespace
    metadata:
      name: gloo-mesh-config
    ---
    apiVersion: admin.gloo.solo.io/v2
    kind: WorkspaceSettings
    metadata:
      name: $MGMT_CLUSTER
      namespace: gloo-mesh-config
    spec:
      options:
        serviceIsolation:
          enabled: false
        federation:
          enabled: false
          serviceSelector:
          - {}
        eastWestGateways:
        - selector:
            labels:
              istio: eastwestgateway
    EOF
      

Verify the installation

  1. Verify that your Gloo Mesh Gateway 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 in the management cluster are running and healthy.
    • The Gloo agent is running and connected to the management server.
      meshctl check
      

    Example output:

      🟢 License status
    
    INFO  gloo-gateway enterprise license expiration is 25 Aug 24 10:38 CDT
    INFO  Valid GraphQL license module found
    
    🟢 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  
      
  2. Verify that the gateway proxy service is created and assigned an external address. It might take a few minutes for the load balancer to deploy. Note: If you did not deploy a managed gateway proxy through the Helm installation, manually deploy the gateway proxy instead.

      kubectl get svc -n gloo-mesh-gateways
      

    Example output:

      NAME                       TYPE           CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP      PORT(S)                                                      AGE
    istio-ingressgateway       LoadBalancer   10.XX.X.XXX    34.XXX.XXX.XXX   15021:30826/TCP,80:31257/TCP,443:30673/TCP,15443:30789/TCP   48s
      

Example istioInstallations settings

You can customize the istioInstallations section of your Helm values files in the following ways.

  • hub: Specify a Solo repo key that you can get by logging in to the Support Center and reviewing the Istio images built by Solo.io support article.
  • tag: Specify the version that you downloaded and append the solo tag, which is required to use many enterprise features, such as 1.20.8-patch1-solo. You can append other tags for the Solo distribution of Istio, as described in About the Solo distribution of Istio. Note: The Istio lifecycle manager is supported only for Istio versions 1.15.4 or later.
  • revision and gatewayRevision: Take the Istio major and minor versions and replace the period with a hyphen, such as 1-20. Note: For testing environments only, you can deploy a revisionless installation by omitting the revision and gatewayRevision fields entirely. Revisionless installations permit in-place upgrades, which are quicker than the canary-based upgrades that are required for revisioned installations. Note that if you deploy multiple Istio installations in the same cluster, only one installation can be revisionless.
  • k8s.serviceAnnotations: You can optionally provide cloud provider-specific service annotations for the gateway load balancer, such as the following annotations for AWS.
  
istioInstallations:
  controlPlane:
    enabled: true
    installations:
      - istioOperatorSpec:
          hub: $repo_key
          tag: 1.20.8-patch1-solo
        revision: 1-20
        skipUpgradeValidation: true
  enabled: true
  northSouthGateways:
    - enabled: true
      name: istio-ingressgateway
      installations:
        - clusters:
          - activeGateway: true
            name: $CLUSTER_NAME
          skipUpgradeValidation: true
          gatewayRevision: 1-20
          istioOperatorSpec:
            hub: $repo_key
            tag: 1.20.8-patch1-solo
            # Optional load balancer annotations
            components:
              ingressGateways:
              - enabled: true
                k8s:
                  serviceAnnotations:
                    service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-backend-protocol: ssl
                    service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-cross-zone-load-balancing-enabled: "true"
                    service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-nlb-target-type: instance
                    service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-scheme: internet-facing
                    service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-ssl-cert: "arn:aws:acm:<cert>"
                    service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-type: external
  

Next steps

Now that you have Gloo Mesh Gateway up and running, check out some of the following resources to learn more about your API Gateway and expand your routing and network capabilities.

Traffic management:

Gloo Mesh Gateway:

Help and support: