Gloo Enterprise 1.3 – New Developer Portal

Solo.io Engineering | April 15, 2020

Today we are excited to announce a new developer portal as part of the latest update to Gloo Enterprise 1.3, our Envoy-based API Gateway. The Gloo developer portal makes it easy to securely publish APIs to developers inside and outside your organization to streamline developer onboarding and productivity. The developer portal is one of many new features and enhancements in Gloo Open Source and Enterprise editions, you can read more about the release here.

At Mission Lane, we are modernizing our platform to support microservices at scale, leveraging platforms like Kubernetes and GitOps methodology to empower and enable our developers to build new services. We chose Gloo as our API gateway because of its Kubernetes native, developer-centric experience in building and exposing the APIs of our different application services as code, seamlessly supporting our adoption of GitOps. Gloo’s new developer portal also enables our business by internally enabling our developers to easily search and test APIs and externally to our integration partners by providing them an interface to access and build solutions to our platform APIs. The declarative nature of the developer portal, helps us to ensure that the state of our defined services is actually what is deployed in production. Ronak Patel, Senior Manager Cloud Platforms at Mission Lane

The new developer portal includes the following features to streamline the developer and operator workflow:

Custom Branding: Gloo’s API admins can customize the portal with the organization’s logo, favicon, colors and customize the image for the hero/background image. Static web pages can also be added to the portal for any custom content that the admin would like to make available to the users accessing the developer portal.

Declarative Configuration: Built using Kubernetes CRDs, Gloo’s developer portal eliminates the need for additional infrastructure like databases. Operators can easily use the admin UI or YAML files to define portals, APIs, create users, and assign them to groups. These CRDs (declarative configuration) can then be included in CI/CD pipelines and Git-based workflows.

Secure Publishing of APIs: Quickly create and publish APIs using the API creation wizard in the admin UI and secure it with the API key authentication feature.

Developer Onboarding : Accelerate and simplify the onboarding process for developers including the creation of API keys, generating documentation and testing API calls. APIs can be secured with API keys and limits can be placed on those keys. This ensures that access to the APIs are protected within and outside of an organization.

Developer Experience: The clean and intuitive UI makes it easy for developers to quickly search and browse available APIs and only the APIs they are authorized to use for their application development. Developers can get detailed information about the API and quickly use and test it from the portal.

Watch the demo video

We have more enhancements planned for the Gloo developer portal coming soon. As Gloo Enterprise is currently updated quarterly and builds on top of the open source project, you can check out all of the new features and enhancements from the past few months here.

Getting Started

Give Gloo Enterprise 1.3 with the developer portal a try today and we’d love to get your feedback in the community slack. Don’t have Gloo Enterprise? Request a trial license here. Existing Gloo Enterprise users will need to upgrade to the latest version before installing the developer portal. Get the upgrade instructions here in our improved documentation site, check out the changelog (catch a glimpse of upcoming beta features), and register for the upcoming webinar to learn more.