Solo.io Adds Legacy SOAP Integration for Gloo Edge 1.8 Release
Service mesh integration software provider Solo.io has released into general availability (GA) version 1.8 of its Gloo Edge Kubernetes-native ingress controller and API gateway. Version 1.8 offers integration for legacy SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) web services and other features, as Solo seeks to improve API-centric support for scaling needs across cloud native environments.
Based on the Envoy Proxy traffic proxy for service mesh architectures, Gloo Edge now helps DevOps teams integrate decades-old SOAP through a single API.
Gloo Edge 1.8’s support for SOAP is “the biggest breakout feature” of the release, Chris Gaun, director of product management for Solo.io, told The New Stack.
In a blog post, Gaun described how SOAP, an XML messaging protocol from the turn of the century, “remains prevalent today for enterprise web services across a number of industries, including financial services and healthcare.”
Yet, “Unfortunately, SOAP (and associated legacy middleware applications) hold back large-scale modernization efforts because there hasn’t been a viable migration approach in the market,” Gaun wrote. “Organizations haven’t been able to tackle incremental deprecation of SOAP web services over time without great difficulty.”
Gloo Edge Enterprise 1.8, with the addition of XSLT 3.0 (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) support, was designed to “modernize SOAP/XML clients and endpoints without fully eliminating SOAP from your web service portfolio,” Gaun wrote.
For organizations struggling to decommission their SOAP web services — a process that can take years in some cases — using Gloo Edge Enterprise 1.8 allows DevOps teams to retain backward compatibility while adopting modern protocols (like Kubernetes) and run them in parallel, Gaun noted.
The need for SOAP support is also an example of how organizations often struggle with integrating a wide range of their legacy infrastructures with more modern environments. As companies shift to microservices architectures, for example, they are “exposing more of their older legacy systems as services,” Erik Frieberg, Solo.io’s chief marketing officer, told The New Stack. As many of the systems use SOAP/XSLT as a messaging protocol, Gloo Edge 1.8 also now supports the legacy messaging protocol “so you can combine services that use REST and gRPC with services that use SOAP,” Frieberg said.
“This enables organizations to standardize on Gloo Mesh as an API Gateway for their microservices architectures because it supports both newer, cloud native APIs and traditional SOAP protocols,” Frieberg said.
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Flagger orchestrating a canary release in conjunction with Gloo Edge API gateway. (Source: Solo.io)
Additionally, Gloo Edge 1.8 was designed to improve support for CI/CD pipelines, as DevOps teams adopt processes utilizing A/B testing, blue/green mirroring and safer canary test releases to help improve the reliability of production releases. “These processes allow organizations to release software to small, sample groups to ensure the new features perform as expected before releasing to everyone,” Frieberg said.
Solo.io also collaborated with GitOps platform provider Weaveworks to add Flagger, which is used to automate canary deployments, to upstream open source Envoy Proxy as well as making Flagger support a native part of Gloo Edge, Frieberg explained.
“Since requests for these applications come through an API Gateway, it is important for the gateway to be incorporated into these processes to effectively and efficiently deploy applications,” Frieberg said.
Other Gloo Edge 1.8 features include:
- Helm usability improvements: Gloo Edge 1.8 was designed to simplify exposing an organization’s own values in Helm, which is used to define, install and upgrade Kubernetes applications.
- Schema in Gloo Edge CRDs: Gloo Edge allows for the use of schemas to validate CRD functions to help “avoid unintentionally breaking anything.”
- Access log redaction for improved security: The ability to redact certain fields while still providing a readable report of activity.
