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September 10, 2019
3 min read

Introducing Kuma: The Universal Service Mesh

Marco Palladino
CTO and Co-Founder

Introducing Kuma

We are excited to announce the release of a new open source project, Kuma - a modern, universal control plane for service mesh! Kuma is based on Envoy, a powerful proxy designed for cloud native applications. Envoy has become the de-facto industry sidecar proxy, with service mesh becoming an important implementation in the cloud native ecosystem as monitoring, security and reliability become increasingly important for microservice applications at scale.

"It's been gratifying to see how quickly Envoy has been adopted by the tech community, and I'm really excited by Kong's new ‘Kuma' project," said Matt Klein, creator of the Envoy proxy. "Kuma extends Envoy's use cases and will make it faster and easier for companies to create cloud native applications and manage them in a service mesh."

Kuma addresses limitations of first-generation service mesh technologies by enabling seamless management of any service on the network, including L4 and L7 traffic, as well as microservices and APIs. Its fast data plane and advanced control plane makes it significantly easier to use and adopt across every team. Kuma runs on any platform, including Kubernetes, virtual machines, containers, bare metal and legacy environments, to enable a more practical cloud native journey across an entire organization.

Out of the box, Kuma makes the underlying network safe, reliable and observable without having to change any code, while still allowing for advanced customization thanks to its mature control plane. The combination of its fast data plane and advanced control plane allows users to easily set permissions, expose metrics and set routing rules with just a few commands by either using native Kubernetes CRDs or a RESTful API.

Kuma's key features include:

  • Software Defined Security - Kuma enables mTLS for all L4 traffic. Permissions can also be easily set to ensure appropriate access control.
  • Powerful Productivity Capabilities - Kuma enables users to quickly implement tracing and logging, allowing users to better analyze metrics for rapid debugging.
  • Sophisticated Routing & Control - Kuma provides fine-grained traffic control capabilities, such as circuit breakers and health checks, to enhance L4 routing.

Kuma is supported and maintained by Kong with the vision to make data available anytime, anywhere by simplifying communication between services. Kuma has been built with lessons learned from more than 150 enterprise organizations running service meshes in production. Kong also plans to continue contributing upstream to the Envoy project.

Want to learn more about #KumaMesh?

  • Read our Getting Started documentation
  • Join us on Slack!
  • Learn more about Kuma at Kong Summit 2019, Oct. 2-3 in San Francisco. Register with code Kuma19 before September 31st for a $99 ticket.