In 2019, my team at Kong introduced a new open source project called Kuma. Now a sandbox project of the CNCF, Kuma is a modern, universal control plane for service mesh based on Envoy. 

As we celebrate Kuma’s achievements, I want to thank the Kuma community for your support and contributions!

We Had an Incredible Year

In the past 12 months alone, Kuma had:

• 800% increase in instances running around the world
• 2,200% increase of data plane proxies around the world
• Adoption across every vertical, with users like Chipotle, Intel, American Airlines, Cisco, Lenovo, Telus and more

Our Community Continues to Grow

Kuma has developed a tight-knit community over the last couple of years. With 2,400 GitHub stars, Kuma receives support from 43 contributors and 800 Slack community members. 

Our biggest contributors over the past year included:

• Tharun Rajendran tharun208
• Austin Cawley-Edwards austince
• Pradeep Murugesan pradeepmurugesan
• Jacek Ewertow jewertow
• Sudeepto Roy sudeeptoroy
• Pascual Gabriel Gabitchov
• Nikita Pande nikita15p
• Nham Le nhamlh
• Xavier Bauquet xbauquet
• Adrian Golawski Pan-Bubr
• Eric Mustin ericmustin
• Bastian Chatelard bchatelard
• Andy Bailey sonicos
• Lennart Querter lennartquerter
• Aadhav Vignesh burntcarrot
• Harsha Vaidya hvydya
• Pablo Loschi pgold30

Also, a special shout out to Austin Crawley-Edwards, who became a maintainer for Kuma this year!

We Pushed 24 Official Releases

In the last year, we went from release 0.7.1 to 1.3 and released hundreds of new features, including 70+ observability charts. Below are highlights from some of the major features shipped in the past 12 months. 

Official Service Map Topology View

Visualize all of your service traffic dependencies with information such as the number of requests and error rates. This new feature ships as a new official Grafana dashboard and can be installed automatically by running kumactl install metrics :

Permissive mTLS

In addition to the traditional “strict” mode, this new mode allows for easier migration of existing applications into the service mesh by allowing more flexibility into how the data plane proxy certificates are validated on incoming requests.

Rate Limiting

Protect your services from aggressive traffic and downtimes to improve overall application reliability.

Enhanced L7 Traffic Routing

New L7 Traffic Routing policy to route – and modify – HTTP traffic per path, method, header or any other combination, with regex support. You can modify traffic before reaching the final destination too. This feature works in addition to the existing L4 traffic routing that Kuma provides.

Improvements in Hybrid and Multi-Zone Capabilities

Kuma’s hybrid capabilities allow different service meshes across Kubernetes and VM workloads and support within the same mesh. This, combined with Kuma’s multi-zone capabilities, allows users to run one control plane of Kuma with as many service meshes as you need on virtually every platform within your organization.

Your Feedback Guides Future Improvements

Kuma’s roadmap is heavily influenced by the user feedback in production. As such, we will:

• Improve performance with our top users to lower CPU and memory consumption on both the data plane proxies and the control planes
• Simplify upgrades and automate them for the most part

Stay in Touch and Keep Up the Feedback

Thank you to the Kuma Community for your support and contributions! Join the Kuma community on GitHub, Slack, Community Calls or Meetup if you haven’t already.