Cloud infrastructure company Solo says it wants to increase the freedom with which cloud engineers can use its technology.  The company is known for its cloud-native application networking services, including API management (Gloo Gateway) and service mesh platforms (Gloo Mesh) for scalable microservices.

Solo senior product manager Adam Sayah and his senior software engineer colleague Jack Kawell have detailed platform-level developments this quarter, which explain how the Gloo Mesh release now provides support and enterprise-grade service mesh capabilities for Amazon ECS workloads.

The pair reminds us that Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) is a managed container orchestration service platform that simplifies running, stopping and managing Docker containers in a cluster. They say that even though ECS can be used to deploy containerized applications without the operational burden of managing infrastructure stacks, ECS users still require security, observability and configurable routing across their instances. 

Could the answer lie in a more automated and managed approach to establishing policy controls? The Solo team thinks it does.

Get Sticky With Gloo Mesh

“Gloo Mesh now delivers full enterprise-grade service mesh capabilities to ECS workloads. Previously, AWS ECS users lacked a unified way to enforce security, policy and governance across environments. Teams relied on custom scripts and ad-hoc integrations to bridge ECS with other tools and platforms, resulting in fragmented controls, operational debt, inconsistent policy enforcement, and increased risk exposure,” wrote Sayah and Kawell, in a technical blog statement.

There may also be an additional concern that ECS users who previously relied on App Mesh will find that AWS has announced App Mesh will be deprecated in the fall of 2026. AWS App Mesh is a managed service mesh designed to simplify monitoring, controlling and debugging communication between microservices, providing consistent visibility and traffic management. 

That being said, let’s remember that AWS introduced Amazon ECS Service Connect as a new way to connect microservices within Amazon ECS at re:Invent 2022. With advice on how to migrate to Service Connect readily available, AWS says that this technology improves the reliability of containerized microservices through built-in health checks, outlier detection and retry mechanisms. 

For additional balance, let’s remember that AWS does provide tools to secure Amazon ECS with what the company calls “a layered approach” using IAM for access control, VPC Security Groups for network isolation, encryption (Transport Layer Security – TLS, AWS Nitro Enclaves) for data in transit/rest, Secrets Manager for secrets, ECR image scanning, and continuous monitoring with AWS tools including CloudTrail/GuardDuty. 

Sidecar-Less Service Mesh

Back at Solo, the message is that the latest 2.11 release of Gloo Mesh introduces native support for ECS built on Istio’s Ambient mode (a sidecar-less service mesh architecture built for security, observability and resilience). 

This release of Gloo Mesh provides ECS users with access to what the Solo team promises is a “reliable service mesh”, eliminating the need for customization or manual reconfigurations between workloads. With this integration, ECS users can now utilize the full set of Istio capabilities and Gloo Mesh enterprise policies while maintaining a simple operational model that aligns with the elasticity of ECS. 

“With Gloo Mesh, ECS workloads can join the mesh through a simple and guided workflow. Teams can manage ECS tasks as first-class services and apply zero-trust security, unified telemetry and traffic policies consistently. This creates a smooth and dependable path forward for App Mesh users who want a solution that is more scalable, easier to manage, and supported by the broader Istio ecosystem,” said Sayah and Kawell.

After providing some set-up and installation advice for Gloo Mesh, the Solo duo explains the discovery and ECS workload integration steps necessary to use their firm’s service. The central technology proposition here is a means for ECS services to become part of a unified network where traffic is secured and observable.