Gloo Mesh Gateway

The following document will take you through the process of installing, verifying the installation, and uninstalling Gloo Portal on top of Gloo Mesh Gateway.

Prerequisites

For this guide, we’ll need the following:

• helm (version v3.0.0 or higher)
• kubectl
• A compatible Kubernetes cluster setup (1.16 or higher), to which you can connect via kubectl
• The Gloo Mesh Enterprise management plane components (version 1.1.0 or higher) installed to the cluster
• A Gloo Mesh VirtualGateway resource that will expose your APIs

Note on Virtual Gateways

The Gloo Portal will create Gloo Mesh VirtualHosts in the same namespaces as the resources that generated them (Environments and Portals). Make sure you have configured a VirtualGateway resource in such a way that the generated VirtualHosts will be applied to it.

Going forward, we will assume the presence of a VirtualGateway that matches all VirtualHosts in all namespaces. Here is a simple example of how such a resource might look like:

apiVersion: networking.enterprise.mesh.gloo.solo.io/v1beta1
kind: VirtualGateway
metadata:
  name: test-gateway
  namespace: gloo-mesh
spec:
  # Determines the ingress gateways on which to expose your APIs.
  # Omitted for brevity.
  ingressGatewaySelectors: []
  connectionHandlers:
  - http:
      routeConfig:
      - virtualHostSelector:
          namespaces:
          - "*"

Current limitations

As mentioned at the top of this page, currently there are some limitations when running Gloo Portal with Gloo Mesh Gateway. The first one is that the APIs that you want to expose must be deployed in the same cluster in which the Gloo Mesh Enterprise management plane is installed. This is mainly due to the current inability to replicate some authentication related resources from the management cluster to the data plane cluster; we are currently working on adding these features to Gloo Mesh Enterprise to fully support the multi-cluster use case.

Another set of limitations is related to Gloo Portal APIs that are not supported when integrating with Gloo Mesh Gateway. This is due to the fact that some features that are required to implement those APIs (e.g. request path rewrites via regex) are currently not implemented in Gloo Mesh Gateway. Following is a list of the currently unsupported Gloo Portal APIs:

• The basePath field on Environment resources is currently not supported.
• The gatewayConfig.httpsRedirect field on Environment resources is not supported.

Installation

To install Gloo Portal you’ll use a Helm chart. You will also need a license key to submit as part of the chart deployment. You can use either a Gloo Portal license or reuse any valid Gloo Mesh Enterprise license. If you do not have a license key, you can request one by clicking on “Get a Demo” on our website.

First we will add the repository with the Helm chart and update the repo contents.

# Add the Helm repository for Gloo Portal
helm repo add gloo-portal https://storage.googleapis.com/dev-portal-helm
helm repo update

Next, let’s create a Helm values override file:

cat << EOF > values.yaml
glooMesh:
  enabled: true
  clusterName: ""
licenseKey:
  secretRef:
    name: gloo-mesh-enterprise-license
    namespace: gloo-mesh
    key: key
EOF

Here’s a brief explanation of the above values:

• glooMesh.enabled enables the integration with Gloo Mesh Enterprise.
• glooMesh.clusterName specifies the name of the cluster in which Gloo Portal will be installed. This information is required by Gloo Portal to automatically set up routing to portal applications. If left empty, Gloo Portal will try to discover the name of the cluster on its own.
• As mentioned earlier, Gloo Portal requires a valid license key. We are assuming that you have already installed Gloo Mesh Enterprise to your cluster, so we use licenseKey.secretRef to reference the existing license key secret. If you wish to create a new license secret, you can just pass in the license key string via the licenseKey.value value. See the Gloo Mesh docs for more info on how to request a Gloo Mesh Enterprise trial license.

Now we can create the target namespace for the deployment and install Gloo Portal referencing the above values file:

# Create the namespace and install the Helm chart
kubectl create namespace gloo-portal
helm install gloo-portal gloo-portal/gloo-portal -n gloo-portal --values values.yaml

Helm will create an installation named gloo-portal.

NAME: gloo-portal
LAST DEPLOYED: XXXXXXXXXXX
NAMESPACE: gloo-portal
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
TEST SUITE: None

Verify your Installation

To verify that your installation was successful, check that the Gloo Portal deployments and services have been created. If you choose to install into a namespace other than gloo-portal, you will need to query your chosen namespace instead.

kubectl get all -n gloo-portal

NAME                                READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/gloo-portal-admin-server-557b64597d-q7vxl   3/3     Running   0          45s
pod/gloo-portal-controller-7d56b8876d-ns7l6     1/1     Running   0          45s

NAME                   TYPE        CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)    AGE
service/gloo-portal                ClusterIP   10.20.2.10             8080/TCP   45s
service/gloo-portal-admin-server   ClusterIP   10.20.10.185           8080/TCP   45s

NAME                           READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
deployment.apps/gloo-portal-admin-server   1/1     1            1           45s
deployment.apps/gloo-portal-controller     1/1     1            1           45s

NAME                                      DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
replicaset.apps/gloo-portal-admin-server-557b64597d   1         1         1       45s
replicaset.apps/gloo-portal-controller-7d56b8876d     1         1         1       45s

Please refer to the Architecture page for more details about what function each deployment serves.

Uninstall

To uninstall the Gloo Portal simply run the following command:

helm uninstall gloo-portal -n gloo-portal

Next Steps

After installing the product, you may want to walk through the Concepts and Getting Started guides.