What is Solo.io?

Profile

Solo.io provides a comprehensive cloud-native connectivity tool centered on API gateway and service mesh management. Built on Envoy Proxy and Kubernetes Gateway API standards, it offers both open-source (kgateway) and enterprise products that address complex service connectivity challenges in distributed systems. The solution has achieved significant industry adoption, with proven deployments across Fortune 2000 companies, and maintains deep integration with the cloud-native ecosystem through CNCF project leadership and contributions to key open-source initiatives like Istio and Envoy.

Focus

Solo.io solves fundamental challenges in cloud-native application networking by providing unified control over service-to-service communication patterns. The platform addresses the complexity of managing API traffic across distributed environments, implementing consistent security policies, and maintaining observability across service meshes. It serves platform engineering teams who need to abstract infrastructure complexity while maintaining security and reliability. Core benefits include simplified operational management, automated security enforcement, and comprehensive traffic control across hybrid environments.

Background

Founded in 2017 by Idit Levine in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Solo.io evolved from addressing service mesh complexity to becoming a comprehensive connectivity platform. The company has achieved unicorn status with $175 million in funding and maintains significant influence in the cloud-native community through leadership positions on the Istio Steering Committee. The core gateway technology was recently donated to CNCF as the kgateway project, establishing vendor-neutral governance while maintaining enterprise offerings. Notable adopters include T-Mobile, BMW, SAP, and Domino's Pizza.

Main features

Multi-directional API management and traffic control

The platform implements comprehensive traffic management across north-south (external API traffic) and east-west (service-to-service) communication patterns. It provides sophisticated routing capabilities including weighted distribution for canary deployments, circuit breaking, and request transformation. The architecture supports multiple protocols (HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket) and enables fine-grained traffic control through both path-based and header-based routing, with distributed rate limiting and automatic failover capabilities.

Zero-trust security automation and policy enforcement

The platform automates critical security infrastructure through centralized policy management and certificate lifecycle handling. It implements mutual TLS encryption between services, manages certificate rotation, and enforces fine-grained authorization policies consistently across environments. The security model integrates with existing identity providers through OAuth2 and OIDC support, while enabling custom authentication logic through external authentication services and WebAssembly filters.

Federated multi-cluster management and observability

The architecture enables centralized control across distributed Kubernetes clusters through a federated management plane. This allows organizations to define policies once and apply them consistently across multiple environments while maintaining independent scaling of control and data planes. The system automatically collects comprehensive telemetry data including metrics, traces, and logs from all proxied traffic, integrating with standard observability platforms like Prometheus and Grafana for unified visibility.