Installing Gloo for Knative


For the purpose of running Knative, Gloo can function as a complete replacement for Istio (supporting all documented Knative features), requiring less resource usage and operational overhead.

This guide walks you through installing Gloo and Knative using glooctl, the Gloo command line.

glooctl generates a manifest which can be piped to stdout or a file using the --dry-run flag. Alternatively, Gloo can be installed via its Helm Chart, which will permit fine-grained configuration of installation parameters.

Installing the Gloo Knative Ingress on Kubernetes

These directions assume you’ve prepared your Kubernetes cluster appropriately. Full details on setting up your Kubernetes cluster here.

Install command line tool (CLI)

The glooctl command line provides useful functions to install, configure, and debug Gloo, though it is not required to use Gloo.

  brew install solo-io/tap/glooctl
  curl -sL | sh
  export PATH=$HOME/.gloo/bin:$PATH

Verify the CLI is installed and running correctly with:

glooctl version

The command returns your client version and a missing server version (we have not installed Gloo yet!):

Client: {"version":"0.20.3"}
Server: version undefined, could not find any version of gloo running

Installing on Kubernetes with glooctl

glooctl, addition to installing Gloo’s Knative Ingress, will install Knative Serving components to the knative-serving namespace if it does not alreay exist in your cluster. This is a modified version of the Knative Serving manifest with the dependencies on Istio removed.

Once your Kubernetes cluster is up and running, run the following command to deploy the Gloo Ingress to the gloo-system namespace and Knative-Serving components to the knative-serving namespace:

glooctl install knative

Note: You can run the command with the flag --dry-run to output the Kubernetes manifests (as yaml) that glooctl will apply to the cluster instead of installing them.

Installing on Kubernetes with Helm

This is the recommended method for installing Gloo to your production environment as it offers rich customization to the Gloo control plane and the proxies Gloo manages.

As a first step, you have to add the Gloo repository to the list of known chart repositories:

helm repo add gloo

The Gloo chart archive contains the necessary value files for the Knative deployment option. Run the following command to download and extract the archive to the current directory:

helm fetch --untar=true --untardir=. gloo/gloo

Finally, install Gloo using the following command:

helm install gloo --namespace gloo-system -f gloo/values-knative.yaml

Gloo can be installed to a namespace of your choosing with the --namespace flag.

Verify your Installation

Check that the Gloo pods and services have been created. Depending on your install option, you may see some differences from the following example. And if you choose to install Gloo into a different namespace than the default gloo-system, then you will need to query your chosen namespace instead.

kubectl get all -n gloo-system
NAME                                          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/discovery-7b6684f57d-ldcvx                1/1     Running   0          73m
pod/gloo-6658f49f64-9zlgh                     1/1     Running   5          73m
pod/ingress-5476d956c7-rrr6m                  1/1     Running   0          73m
pod/knative-external-proxy-fdfc894fb-6w4m9    1/1     Running   0          73m
pod/knative-internal-proxy-745c9f6f86-t7h5j   1/1     Running   0          73m

service/gloo                     ClusterIP   <none>          9977/TCP                     73m
service/knative-external-proxy   LoadBalancer   80:30388/TCP,443:32060/TCP   73m
service/knative-internal-proxy   ClusterIP   <none>          80/TCP,443/TCP               73m

NAME                                     READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
deployment.apps/discovery                1/1     1            1           73m
deployment.apps/gloo                     1/1     1            1           73m
deployment.apps/ingress                  1/1     1            1           73m
deployment.apps/knative-external-proxy   1/1     1            1           73m
deployment.apps/knative-internal-proxy   1/1     1            1           73m

NAME                                                DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
replicaset.apps/discovery-7b6684f57d                1         1         1       73m
replicaset.apps/gloo-6658f49f64                     1         1         1       73m
replicaset.apps/ingress-5476d956c7                  1         1         1       73m
replicaset.apps/knative-external-proxy-fdfc894fb    1         1         1       73m
replicaset.apps/knative-internal-proxy-745c9f6f86   1         1         1       73m


To uninstall Gloo and all related components, simply run the following.

This will also remove Knative-Serving, if it was installed by glooctl.

glooctl uninstall

If you installed Gloo to a different namespace, you will have to specify that namespace using the -n option:

glooctl uninstall -n my-namespace

Next Steps

To begin using Gloo with Knative, check out the Knative User Guide.