Product Releases
August 4, 2020
3 min read

Kong Mesh 1.0 Released!

Marco Palladino
CTO and Co-Founder

Read about the newest version: Kong Mesh 1.2

Archived post below.

We are happy to announce the general availability of Kong Mesh 1.0! Kong Mesh is Kong’s first enterprise service mesh built on top of Kuma and Envoy that organizations can use to deploy a modern mesh across every application — running on both Kubernetes and VMs — and on every cloud or data-center.

Focused on ease of use, Kong Mesh leverages Kuma’s unique features in the service mesh ecosystem to provide a supported multi-mesh product that can scale across many teams and LOBs, while at the same time delivering the cross-cluster and cross-cloud connectivity that Kong’s customers are demanding from their modern architectures.

Finally, Kong now provides a full stack platform that can manage end-to-end connectivity for every use case, from API gateway to service mesh, with a fully integrated experience so that our customers can focus on what they do best — their applications — while their service connectivity is taken care of by Kong Enterprise and Kong Mesh.

Enabling the Microservices Transformation

As more organizations accelerate their digital transformation, they are also transitioning to distributed software architectures to support and accelerate innovation, gain digital revenues, and reduce costs. A successful transition to microservices requires that services are connected reliably with minimal latency, protected with end-to-end security, and discoverable and fully observable. However, this presents challenges due to the need to write custom code for security and identity, a lack of granular telemetry, and insufficient traffic management capabilities, especially as the number of services grow.

Leading organizations are looking to service meshes to address these challenges in a scalable and standardized way to:

  1. Ensure service connectivity, discovery and traffic reliability: Apply out-of-the-box traffic management to intelligently route traffic across any platform and any cloud to meet expectations and SLAs
  2. Achieve Zero-Trust Security: Restrict access by default, encrypt all traffic and only complete transactions when identity is verified
  3. Gain Global Traffic Observability: Gain a detailed understanding of your service behavior to increase application reliability and the efficiency of your teams

Kong Mesh is the universal service mesh for enterprise organizations focused on simplicity and scalability with Kuma and Envoy. Kong's service mesh is unique in that it allows organizations to:

  1. Start, secure and scale with ease: Deploy a turn-key service mesh with a single command. Group services by attributes to efficiently apply policies. Manage multiple service meshes as tenants of a single control plane to provide scale and reduce operational costs.
  2. Run anywhere: Deploy the service mesh across any environment, including multi-cluster, multi-cloud and multi-platform. Manage service meshes natively in Kubernetes using Kong Mesh’s CRDs, or start with a service mesh in VM environments and migrate to Kubernetes at your own pace.
  3. Connect services end-to-end: Integrate into the Kong Enterprise platform for full stack connectivity, including ingress and egress traffic for your service mesh. Expose mesh services for internal or external consumption and manage the full lifecycle of APIs.

Kuma + Envoy

By leveraging CNCF technologies like Kuma and Envoy, Kong Mesh provides an open and neutral foundation in line with Kong’s open source DNA. We believe that modern infrastructure is open source, and that’s why Kong Mesh allows any organization to have full control of its technology stack, while at the same time creating secure and reliable service connectivity for every application being deployed.

Particularly, Kuma provides a unique combination of features in the service mesh landscape that is unmatched by other technologies, such as:

  • Multi-mesh support and ease of use: to scale across every team and application in the organization with one control plane for as many meshes as we need
  • Native and universal support for both Kubernetes and VMs, along with attribute-based policies: to support all services and apply flexible traffic policy configurations per region or per country
  • Multi-zone connectivity: to automatically support connectivity across multiple clouds and clusters via global/remote control plane separation and native ingress

To learn more, you can get in touch with our team and see a live demo of the product.