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.

You can follow this guide to quickly get started with Gloo Mesh Gateway. To learn more about the benefits and architecture, see About. To customize your installation with Helm instead, see the advanced installation guide. To set up the management plane in a dedicated management cluster and the data plane in workload clusters instead of a single-cluster setup, see the multicluster installation guide.

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=v2.7.1 sh -
export PATH=$HOME/.gloo-mesh/bin:$PATH
    • helm, the Kubernetes package manager.

  2. 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>

  3. 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>

Install Gloo Mesh Gateway

  1. Install Gloo Mesh Gateway 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-gateway-single,ratelimit,extauth \
  --set common.cluster=${CLUSTER_NAME} \
  --set glooMgmtServer.createGlobalWorkspace=true \
  --set licensing.glooGatewayLicenseKey=${GLOO_MESH_GATEWAY_LICENSE_KEY}
  
      meshctl install --profiles gloo-mesh-gateway-single-openshift,ratelimit,extauth \
  --set common.cluster=${CLUSTER_NAME} \
  --set glooMgmtServer.createGlobalWorkspace=true \
  --set licensing.glooGatewayLicenseKey=${GLOO_MESH_GATEWAY_LICENSE_KEY}

  2. 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 are running and healthy.
      meshctl check

    Example output:

      🟢 License status

INFO  gloo-gateway 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
  3. 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 an ingress gateway

Use the Solo distribution of Istio to install an Istio ingress gateway.

  1. Set environment variables for the Solo distribution of Istio that you want to install.

    • REPO: The repo key for the 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.
    • ISTIO_VERSION: The version of Istio that you want to install, such as 1.25.2.
      export REPO=<repo-key>
export ISTIO_VERSION=1.25.2

  2. Add and update the Helm repository for Istio.

      helm repo add istio https://istio-release.storage.googleapis.com/charts
helm repo update

  3. Install the Istio CRDs.

      helm upgrade --install istio-base istio/base \
  -n istio-system \
  --version ${ISTIO_VERSION} \
  --create-namespace \
  --set defaultRevision=main

  4. Create the istiod control plane in your cluster.

      helm upgrade --install istiod istio/istiod \
  --version ${ISTIO_VERSION} \
  --namespace istio-system \
  --set global.hub=${REPO} \
  --set global.tag="${ISTIO_VERSION}-solo" \
  --set revision=main \
  --set license.value=${GLOO_MESH_LICENSE_KEY}
    1. Install the CNI plug-in, which is required for using Istio in OpenShift.
        helm upgrade --install istio-cni istio/cni \
  --namespace kube-system \
  --version ${ISTIO_VERSION} \
  --set cni.cniBinDir=/var/lib/cni/bin \
  --set cni.cniConfDir=/etc/cni/multus/net.d \
  --set cni.cniConfFileName="istio-cni.conf" \
  --set cni.chained=false \
  --set cni.privileged=true
    2. Deploy the istiod control plane.
        helm upgrade --install istiod istio/istiod \
  --version ${ISTIO_VERSION} \
  --namespace istio-system \
  --set global.hub=${REPO} \
  --set global.tag="${ISTIO_VERSION}-solo" \
  --set revision=main \
  --set global.platform=openshift \
  --set license.value=${GLOO_MESH_LICENSE_KEY}

  5. Create an Istio ingress gateway.

      helm upgrade --install istio-ingressgateway istio/gateway \
  --version ${ISTIO_VERSION} \
  --namespace istio-ingress \
  --create-namespace \
  --set global.hub=${REPO} \
  --set global.tag="${ISTIO_VERSION}-solo" \
  --wait

  6. 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.

      kubectl get svc -n istio-ingress

    Example output:

      NAME                   TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP      PORT(S)                                                      AGE
istio-ingressgateway   LoadBalancer   10.XX.XXX.XXX   35.XXX.XXX.XXX   15021:30826/TCP,80:31257/TCP,443:30673/TCP,15443:30789/TCP   48s

  7. Optional for OpenShift: Expose the ingress gateway by using an OpenShift route.

      oc -n istio-ingress expose svc istio-ingressgateway --port=http2

Next

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

Understand what happened

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

Gloo Mesh Gateway installation: This quick start guide used meshctl to install a minimum deployment of Gloo Mesh Gateway 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. 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 Gateway, 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.

Gateway proxy installation: The gateway proxy installation profiles in this getting started guide were provided within the Gloo installation Helm chart. However, Gloo Mesh Gateway can discover gateway deployments regardless of their installation options. For more information about gateway proxy lifecycle management with Gloo, check out the Gateway lifecycle manager API.

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.