Solo.io Offers an Enterprise-Ready Istio Service Mesh as a Cloud Service

Touting the “industry’s first” Istio Service-Mesh-as-a-Service, Solo.io has launched Gloo Cloud, which offers the Gloo Mesh Istio service mesh and other tools minus the installation, maintenance and other associated operational tasks.
Indeed, while deemed as a necessary component for microservices management, the Istio service mesh itself can still pose operational challenges for DevOps teams.
“We saw that our customers were still responsible for installing and managing our product and Istio, making sure it worked and so on,” Idit Levine, founder and CEO, Solo.io, told The New Stack. “We saw that we could better help by managing these operations as well as Istio services for them. Basically, the only thing that the customer will need to do is to manage their own simple clusters and register them into the system.”
Gloo Mesh and other Solo.io software offer, among other things, a single gateway that integrates different Kubernetes-management open source components, including the Envoy distributed proxy, and the Istio open source service mesh. Solo.io’s range of software, for example, includes the API gateway Gloo Edge, and Gloo Mesh, which is a service mesh built on top of Istio with multiple cluster-management capabilities, as well as Gloo Portal for API definitions and policies, as well as web assembly capabilities.
Gloo Cloud will first be adopted by future customers before they integrate other Solo.io tools and platforms into their DevOps environments, Erik Frieberg, solo.io’s chief marketing officer, predicted to The New Stack.
“If you’re looking for service mesh capabilities, you’ll go to Gloo cloud, and then you’ll say ‘now that I’ve managed the traffic within, I’ll work start worrying about Gloo Edge or maybe a developer portal later on,’” Frieberg said.
“It seems like Solo.io is aiming to bring the advantages of grid computing to the still very messy Kubernetes universe, and that is exciting news to anyone who has witnessed developers spending a large amount of time on debugging environments,” Torsten Volk, an analyst for Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), said.
To learn more about Solo.io’s family of service mesh software, check out the company’s SoloCon 2021 user conference, to be held Tuesday and Wednesday, March 23-24.