About

About Solo Enterprise for Istio link

Solo Enterprise for Istio enhances your Istio service mesh with enterprise support, hardened distributions, and enhanced observability. The product consists of the following two main components that you can use together or independently.

Solo distribution of Istio link

Solo Enterprise for Istio works with community Istio out of the box. You can also replace community Istio with Solo’s hardened Istio images. The Solo distribution of Istio is a hardened enterprise image that maintains n-4 support for CVEs and other security fixes. The Solo distribution of Istio also includes numerous features and built-in support that you can unlock with three levels of Solo licenses. For more information, see Solo distributions of Istio.

Solo UI link

Optionally, you can deploy the Solo UI alongside your Istio environment to gain increased observability. The UI gives you an at-a-glance view of the configuration, health, and compliance status of your Istio resources across single or multicluster environments, including existing installations across clusters and infrastructure providers.

For more information, see the Solo UI architecture.

Enterprise support link

The Solo distribution of Istio includes numerous features that you can unlock with three levels of Solo licenses. If you provide a -solo tagged image of Istio version 1.25 or later and your Solo license in your Istio installation values, your Istio installation is automatically enabled with the features provided by your license.

• Basic features are unlocked with a Basic license. These standard features provide you with long-term and FIPS support for Istio on top of the open source offerings of Istio.
• Premium features are unlocked with a Premium license. In addition to all Basic features, a Premium license unlocks better environment visibility and analysis with the Solo UI, and increased Solo support.
• Enterprise features are unlocked with an Enterprise license. In addition to all Basic and Premium features, a Premium license unlocks the most comprehensive enterprise-level features to help you build out your ideal, customized mesh setup.

If you do not already have a Basic, Premium, or Enterprise license, you can contact an account representative to obtain one. Note that if you use a Premium or Enterprise license to install a Solo distribution of Istio, you can also use the same license to install the Solo UI for better visibility into your environment.

To review the features that each license level supports, see the Istio support plans comparison on Solo.io. To learn more about select features that are enabled by an Enterprise license, see Enterprise features.

Lifecycle management link

As a service mesh, Istio solves connectivity challenges that arise with microservice architectures. Many microservices can mean many ingress and egress points. In regulated and secured environments, you might need many ingress and egress gateways. Even further, microservices split not only into many apps, but often in many clusters, requiring complex multicluster configurations too.

Solo Enterprise for Istio simplifies lifecycle management activities with three automation systems: Istio installation and upgrades, waypoint deployment, and multicluster peering (beta).

Istio installation link

Solo Enterprise for Istio supports full service mesh lifecycle management with the Gloo Operator. With Gloo Operator, you no longer need to manually install and manage the istiod control plane, Istio CNI, ztunnels, and more. Instead, you provide minimal Istio configuration to the operator in a ServiceMeshController custom resource, and the operator translates this configuration into managed installations of all necessary Istio components in your cluster for you. The operator can even detect your cluster platform, and set the appropriate fields required for that platform. 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.

To get started, see the Gloo Operator installation guides for ambient or sidecar service meshes.

Waypoint deployment link

If you deploy an ambient mesh and require waypoint proxies to apply Layer 7 policies, you can use versions 1.25 and later of the Solo distribution of Istio to automate the waypoint deployment. Instead of manually creating a waypoint proxy resource, and then labeling a namespace, service, or service entry to use that waypoint, you can simply label the namespace, service, or service entry with istio.io/use-waypoint=auto. Istiod automatically creates the appropriate waypoint and applies it to your target resource.

Note that this automation currently only creates waypoints with the istio-waypoint Gateway class. For more information, see About waypoints.

Operational observability link

The Solo UI includes a built-in telemetry pipeline based on OpenTelemetry that scrapes Istio metrics from istiod, ztunnel, and waypoint proxy pods, collects traces and Kubernetes events, and stores all telemetry in a local ClickHouse instance. The Solo UI reads directly from ClickHouse to power the service graph, metrics views, and resource overviews.

For more information, see Solo UI overview.