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Passthrough Auth

When using Gloo Gateway’s external authentication server, it may be convenient to authorize requests with your own server. Gloo Gateway allows this functionality with two types of passthrough auth:

gRPC Passthrough Auth: Authenticating using an external grpc service that implements Envoy's Authorization Service API.

Http Passthrough Auth: Authenticating using an external Http service.

Passthrough auth vs. Custom Auth vs. Custom Extauth plugin

You can also implement your own auth with Gloo Gateway with a Custom Auth server or an Extauth plugin.

Passthrough vs. Custom Auth server With passthrough, you can leverage other Gloo Gateway extauth implementations (e.g. OIDC, API key, etc.) alongside custom logic. A custom auth server is not integrated with Gloo Gateway extauth so it can not do this.

Passthrough vs. Extauth plugin Using Gloo Gateway to passthrough requests to a separate authentication component eliminates the need to recompile extauth plugins with each version of Gloo Gateway Enterprise.

Passthrough Cons While using a Passthrough service does provide additional flexibility and convenience with auth configuration, it does require an additional network hop from Gloo Gateway’s external auth service to the gRPC service.