Solo.io Inc. today introduced a new product, Gloo Federation, that allows enterprises to enable central management of how traffic flows to their cloud applications and other backend workloads.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Solo.io is backed by more than $11 million in funding from investors, including Redpoint Ventures. The startup is behind a popular open-source tool called Gloo that helps manage the requests and data that sent to applications. Gloo Federation allows organizations with multiple Gloo clusters to manage those deployments centrally, as well as link them together to protect against outages.

Enterprise workloads rely on their application programming interfaces to communicate with the outside world. APIs are what an analytics service uses to pull records from an accounting system, as well as what field sensors in a factory would rely on to send back readings to the corporate data warehouse. But even though an application’s APIs facilitate basic communications, there are also additional requirements such as the ability to enforce security rules that necessitate deploying additional technologies. 

That’s where Solo.io’s Gloo tool comes into the picture. It serves as an API gateway and ingress controller, allowing organizations to connect applications with one another via their APIs as well as implement security controls to fend off any potential hacking attempts. Gloo Federation adds an additional layer of abstraction on top of the tool that allows administrators to manage multiple deployments via a centralized console. 

“Over the last couple of years, we have witnessed an increase in the scale and complexity of our customers and environments, and with it a growth in the number of Gloo instances they run,” explained Solo.io Chief Executive Officer Idit Levine (pictured). “Gloo Federation addresses multiple ideas and requests from our customers, who wanted to simplify the management of their environment.”

Gloo Federation provides a dashboard that shows the status of the Gloo deployments so administrators can determine at a glance if there are issues requiring their attention. The product also aims to help manage those clusters. There’s a global configuration feature that, according to Solo.io, makes it possible to define settings centrally across multiple Gloo deployments and create configuration templates to ease the setup of new installations.

Disaster recovery is another use case the startup is checking off its list. Gloo Federation lets administrators link their Gloo deployments so that if one suffers an outage, another can automatically take over. Clusters can also coordinate in other ways, namely by passing on API requests to another cluster when certain conditions are met.

Levine appeared on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE studio in 2018, when the startup had only five employees, and shared some background about Gloo (below). The executive explained that the technology was born out of necessity. “We wanted to make sure that people will be able to take the monolithic [applications] and at least extend them to microservices like Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, and to serverless,” Levine said. “But we needed some technology for that, and we looked outside and discovered that the first thing that we needed is probably a very good API gateway.” 

Photo: SiliconANGLE