Connecting to all the services and microservices that a modern cloud native enterprise application requires can be a complicated task. It’s an area that startup Solo.io is trying to disrupt with the new release of its Gloo Mesh Enterprise platform.
Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Solo has had focus since its founding on a concept known as a service mesh. A service mesh provides an optimized approach to connect different components together in an automated approach, often inside of a Kubernetes cloud native environment.
Idit Levine, founder and CEO at Solo, explained to TechCrunch that she knew from the outset when she started the company in 2017 that it might take a few years till the market understood the concept of the service mesh and why it is needed. That’s why her company also built out an API gateway technology that helps developers connect APIs, which can be different data sources or services.
Until this week, the API and service mesh components of Solo’s Gloo Mesh Enterprise offering were separate technologies, with different configurations and control planes. That is now changing with the integration of both API and service mesh capabilities into a unified service. The integrated capabilities should make it easier to set up and configure all manner of services in the cloud that are running on Kubernetes.
Solo’s service mesh, known as Gloo Mesh, is based on the open source Istio project, which was created by Google. The API product is called Gloo Edge, which uses the open source Envoy project, originally created by ride sharing company Lyft. Levine explained that her team has now used Istio’s plugin architecture to connect with Envoy in an optimized approach.
Levine noted that many users start off with an API gateway and then extend to using the service mesh. With the new Gloo Mesh Enterprise update, she expects customer adoption to accelerate further as Solo will be able to differentiate against rivals in both the service mesh and API management markets.
While the service mesh space is still emerging including rivals such as Tetrate, API gateways are a more mature technology. There are a number of established vendors in the API management space including Kong which has raised $71 million in funding. Back in 2016, Google acquired API vendor Apigee for $625 million and has been expanding the technology in the years since, including the Apigee X platform announced in February of this year.
With the integration of Gloo Edge for API management into Gloo Mesh Enterprise, Solo isn’t quite covering all the bases for API technology, yet. Gloo Edge supports REST based APIs, which are by far the most common today, though it doesn’t support the emerging GraphQL API standard, which is becoming increasingly popular. Levine told us to ‘stay tuned’ for a future GraphQL announcement for Solo and its platform.
Solo has raised a total of $36.5 million across two rounds, with an $11 million Series A in 2018 and a $23 million Series B announced in October 2020. The company’s investors include Redpoint and True Ventures.
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