Use Solo Enterprise for kgateway as the ingress gateway for your ambient mesh.

About ambient mesh

Solo.io and Google collaborated to develop ambient mesh , a new “sidecarless” architecture for the Istio service mesh. Ambient mesh uses node-level ztunnels to route and secure Layer 4 traffic between pods with mutual TLS (mTLS). Waypoint proxies enforce Layer 7 traffic policies whenever needed. To onboard apps into the ambient mesh, you simply label the namespace the app belongs to. Because no sidecars need to be injected in to your apps, ambient mesh significantly reduces the complexity of adopting a service mesh.

To learn more about ambient, see the ambient mesh documentation.

About this guide

In this guide, you learn how to use Solo Enterprise for kgateway as the ingress gateway to route traffic to the httpbin app that is part of an ambient service mesh.

This guide assumes that you run your ambient mesh in a single cluster and want to use Solo Enterprise for kgateway as the ingress gateway to protect your ambient mesh services.

Ingress gateway integration for an ambient mesh
Ingress gateway integration for an ambient mesh

Before you begin

  1. Follow the Get started guide to install Solo Enterprise for kgateway.

  2. Follow the Sample app guide to create a gateway proxy with an HTTP listener and deploy the httpbin sample app.

  3. Get the external address of the gateway and save it in an environment variable.

      export INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS=$(kubectl get svc -n kgateway-system http -o jsonpath="{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0]['hostname','ip']}")
echo $INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS  
  
      kubectl port-forward deployment/http -n kgateway-system 8080:8080

Step 1: Enable the Istio integration

Upgrade your Solo Enterprise for kgateway installation to enable the Istio integration so that Solo Enterprise for kgateway works with Istio DestinationRules.

  1. Get the Helm values for your current Helm installation.

      helm get values enterprise-kgateway -n kgateway-system -o yaml > enterprise-kgateway.yaml
open enterprise-kgateway.yaml

  2. Add the following values to the Helm values file to enable the Istio integration in Solo Enterprise for kgateway.

      
controller:
  extraEnv:
    KGW_ENABLE_ISTIO_INTEGRATION: true

  3. Upgrade your Helm installation.

      helm upgrade -i --namespace kgateway-system --version 2.1.5 enterprise-kgateway oci://us-docker.pkg.dev/solo-public/enterprise-kgateway/charts/enterprise-kgateway -f enterprise-kgateway.yaml

Step 2: Set up an ambient mesh

Set up an ambient mesh in your cluster to secure service-to-service communication with mutual TLS. You can use Solo.io’s Gloo Operator to install a managed ambient mesh, or manually install and manage your own ambient mesh installation.

  • Solo distribution of Istio: The -solo distribution of Istio is a hardened Istio enterprise image, which maintains n-4 support for CVEs and other security fixes. Note that a Solo Enterprise for Istio Enterprise-level license is required to install the Solo distribution of Istio. Choose from the following options for installing ambient.

  • Community ambient mesh: Install the community version of ambient mesh by following the ambient mesh quickstart tutorial. This tutorial uses a script to quickly set up an ambient mesh in your cluster. You do not need to create an Istio ingress gateway as you configure Gloo Gateway as the ingress gateway for your ambient mesh.

Step 3: Set up the ingress gateway

To set up Solo Enterprise for kgateway as the ingress gateway for your ambient mesh, you simply add all the namespaces that you want to secure to your ambient mesh, including the namespace that your gateway proxy is deployed to.

  1. Add the httpbin and optionally the kgateway-system namespace to your ambient mesh. The label instructs istiod to configure a ztunnel socket on all the pods in that namespace so that traffic to these pods is secured via mutual TLS (mTLS). If you do not label the kgateway-system namespace, the traffic from the gateway proxy to the app is not secured via mTLS.

      kubectl label ns kgateway-system istio.io/dataplane-mode=ambient
kubectl label ns httpbin istio.io/dataplane-mode=ambient

  2. Send a request to the httpbin app and verify that you get back a 200 HTTP response code. All traffic from the gateway is automatically intercepted by a ztunnel that is co-located on the same node as the gateway. The ztunnel collects Layer 4 metrics before it forwards the request to the ztunnel that is co-located on the same node as the httpbin app. The connection between ztunnels is secured via mutual TLS.

      curl -i http://$INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS:8080/headers -H "host: www.example.com:8080"

    Example output:

      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
...
{
 "headers": {
   "Accept": [
     "*/*"
    ],
    "Host": [
      "www.example.com:8080"
    ],
    "User-Agent": [
      "curl/8.7.1"
    ],
    "X-Envoy-Expected-Rq-Timeout-Ms": [
      "15000"
    ],
    "X-Forwarded-Proto": [
      "http"
    ],
   "X-Request-Id": [
      "929c334b-e611-4aba-9bc6-ad6b2450db26"
    ]
  }
}

    1. Port-forward the http pod on port 8080.

        kubectl port-forward deployment/http -n kgateway-system 8080:8080

    2. Send a request to the httpbin app and verify that you get back a 200 HTTP response code.

        curl -i localhost:8080/headers -H "host: www.example.com"

      Example output:

        HTTP/1.1 200 OK
...
{
"headers": {
   "Accept": [
   "*/*"
   ],
   "Host": [
      "www.example.com:8080"
   ],
   "User-Agent": [
      "curl/8.7.1"
   ],
   "X-Envoy-Expected-Rq-Timeout-Ms": [
      "15000"
   ],
   "X-Forwarded-Proto": [
      "http"
   ],
   "X-Request-Id": [
      "929c334b-e611-4aba-9bc6-ad6b2450db26"
   ]
 }
}

  3. Verify that traffic between the gateway proxy and the httpbin app is secured via mutual TLS. Because traffic in an ambient mesh is intercepted by the ztunnels that are co-located on the same node as the sending and receiving service, you can check the logs of the ztunnels.

    1. Find the NODE that the httpbin app runs on.

        kubectl get pods -n httpbin -o wide

      Example output:

        NAME                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   IP           NODE                                                  NOMINATED NODE   READINESS GATES
httpbin-54cf575757-hdv8t   3/3     Running   0          22h   10.XX.X.XX   gke-ambient-default-pool-bb9a8da5-bdf4   <none>           <none>

    2. Find the ztunnel that runs on the same node as the httpbin app.

        kubectl get pods -n istio-system -o wide | grep ztunnel

    3. Check the logs of that ztunnel instance and verify that the source and destination workloads have a SPIFFE ID.

        kubectl logs <ztunnel-instance> -n istio-system

      Example output:

        2025-03-19T17:32:42.762545Z	info	http access	request complete	src.addr=10.0.71.117:42468 src.workload="http-9db6c8995-l54dw" src.namespace="kgateway-system" src.identity="spiffe://cluster.local/ns/kgateway-system/sa/http" dst.addr=10.0.65.144:15008 dst.hbone_addr=10.0.65.144:8080 dst.service="httpbin.httpbin.svc.cluster.local" dst.workload="httpbin-577649ddb-7nc8p" dst.namespace="httpbin" dst.identity="spiffe://cluster.local/ns/httpbin/sa/httpbin" direction="inbound" method=GET path="/headers" protocol=HTTP1 response_code=200 host="www.example.com:8080" user_agent="curl/8.7.1" request_id="4c5fc679-c5cd-4721-8735-51bcdbea6e0f" duration="0ms"
2025-03-19T17:32:46.810472Z	info	access	connection complete	src.addr=10.0.71.117:42468 src.workload="http-9db6c8995-l54dw" src.namespace="kgateway-system" src.identity="spiffe://cluster.local/ns/kgateway-system/sa/http" dst.addr=10.0.65.144:15008 dst.hbone_addr=10.0.65.144:8080 dst.service="httpbin.httpbin.svc.cluster.local" dst.workload="httpbin-577649ddb-7nc8p" dst.namespace="httpbin" dst.identity="spiffe://cluster.local/ns/httpbin/sa/httpbin" direction="inbound" bytes_sent=1290 bytes_recv=550 duration="6742ms"
## Next Now that you set up Solo Enterprise for kgateway as the ingress gateway for your ambient mesh, you can further control and secure ingress traffic with [Policies](../../../../about/policies/).