The Function Gateway

What is Gloo?

Gloo is a high-performance, plugin-extendable, platform-agnostic function Gateway built on top of Envoy. Gloo is designed for microservice, monolithic, and serverless applications. By employing function-level routing, Gloo can completely decouple client APIs from upstream APIs at the routing level. Gloo serves as an abstraction layer between clients and upstream services, allowing front-end teams to work independently of teams developing the microservices their apps connect to.

Features

Microservice Platform Integrations with Service Discovery:

• Kubernetes
• OpenShift
• HashiCorp Stack (Vault, Consul, Nomad)
• Cloud Foundry

Serverless Platform Integrations with Function Discovery:

• AWS Lambda
• Microsoft Azure Functions
• Google Cloud Platform Functions
• Fission
• OpenFaaS
• ProjectFn

Routing Features:

• Dynamic Load Balancing: Load balance traffic across multiple upstream services.
• Health Checks: Active and passive monitoring of your upstream services.
• OpenTracing: Monitor requests using the well-supported OpenTracing standard
• Monitoring: Export HTTP metrics to Prometheus or Statsd
• SSL: Highly customizable options for adding SSL encryption to upstream services with full support for SNI.
• Transformations: Add, remove, or manipulate HTTP requests and responses.
• Automated API Translation: Automatically transform client requests to upstream API calls using Gloo’s Function Discovery
• CLI: Control your Gloo cluster from the command line.
• Declarative API: Gloo features a declarative YAML-based API; store your configuration as code and commit it with your projects.
• Failure Recovery: Gloo is completely stateless and will immediately return to the desired configuration at boot time.
• Scalability: Gloo acts as a control plane for Envoy, allowing Envoy instances and Gloo instances to be scaled independently. Both Gloo and Envoy are stateless.
• Performance: Gloo leverages Envoy for its high performance and low footprint.
• Plugins: Extendable architecture for adding functionality and integrations to Gloo.
• Tooling: Build and Deployment tool for customized builds and deployment options
• Events: Invoke APIs using CloudEvents.
• Pub/Sub: Publish HTTP requests to NATS
• JSON-to-gRPC transcoding: Connect JSON clients to gRPC services

Documentation

About gloo:

• Introduction: Introduction to Gloo with a basic overview of Gloo itself and its use cases
• Concepts: Explanation of the key concepts used in Gloo.
• Architecture: Overview of Gloo's architecture. Covers architecture at a high level, and the component architecture

Installation:

• Installing on Kubernetes: Installation guide for Kubernetes (recommended)
• Installing on OpenShift: Installation guide for OpenShift

Getting Started:

• Getting Started on Kubernetes: Getting started with Kubernetes (recommended for first time users)
• Function Routing on Kubernetes: Introduction to Function Routing with Gloo
• Getting Started on OpenShift: Getting started with OpenShift
• Function Routing on OpenShift: Introduction to Function Routing with Gloo (OpenShift version)
• AWS Lambda: Basic AWS Lambda with Gloo

Tutorials

• Refactoring Monoliths with Gloo: Using Gloo to refactor monolithic apps

• Converting webhooks to NATS Messages with Gloo: Using Gloo to convert webhooks to NATS messages for event-driven architectures.

Plugins:

• AWS Lambda Plugin: Description of the AWS Lambda Plugin and config rules for AWS Lambda Upstreams and Functions
• Kubernetes Plugin: Description of the Kubernetes Plugin and config rules for Kubernetes Upstreams
• Service Plugin: Description of the Service Plugin and config rules for Service Upstreams
• Request Transformation Plugin: Description of the Request Transformation Plugin and config rules for Request Transformation Routes and Functions

v1 API reference:

• Upstreams: API Specification for the Gloo Upstream Config Object
• Virtual: API Specification for the Gloo Virtual Service Config Object
• Metadata: API Specification for Gloo Config Object Metadata
• Status: API Specification for Gloo Config Object Status

Blogs & Demos

• Announcement Blog
• Building hybrid app demo

Community

Join us on our slack channel: https://slack.solo.io/

Thanks

Gloo would not be possible without the valuable open-source work of projects in the community. We would like to extend a special thank-you to Envoy.