Concept: American enterprise-grade service startup Solo.io (Solo) has introduced an enterprise platform that integrates its cloud-native API gateway, Gloo Edge, with its service mesh named Gloo mesh. The integration eases up the setup of the platform and it configures all services in the cloud that are running on Kubernetes.

Nature of Disruption: Gloo Edge is an API gateway that directs requests from users or applications to the relevant applications and microservices. Being an entry point for inbound connections and responses, it handles ingress and egress. Gloo mesh Gloo Mesh is Google’s Istio-based service mesh and control plane that simplifies and unifies service-to-service connection configuration, operation, and visibility inside distributed applications. The approach is automated and is often inside of a Kubernetes cloud-native environment. Gloo Edge is an API gateway and ingress controller developed on Lyft’s Envoy Proxy to ease and secure application traffic at the edge computing technology. With the integration of these two, customer adoption is accelerated, as it can differentiate against competitors in the service mesh and API management market. Moreover, Gloo Edge supports REST (representational state transfer)-based APIs but it does not support GraphQL API standard.

Outlook: Present cloud-native enterprise application requires a connection with services and microservices which can be a complicated task to be executed. With Solo’s integration of service mesh and cloud-native API gateway, enterprises can have a connection with services and microservices. Solo along with Gloo Edge and Gloo Mesh also offers Gloo Extensions to extend and personalize API infrastructures with tooling for WebAssembly, plugins, and operators. The startup has recently accumulated $36.5M across two rounds, with an $11M Series A in 2018 and a $23M Series B announced in October 2020 with investments from Redpoint and True Ventures.