After having announced Kuma 1.0 GA with over 70+ new features and improvements (and Kuma 1.0.1 this week), we are finally happy to announce a new major version of Kong Mesh that includes all the latest Kuma features – and more – in a fully supported enterprise package.

With Kong Mesh 1.1 we can now deploy the most advanced enterprise service mesh in production across every cloud and private datacenter, on both Kubernetes and virtual machines.

With Kong Mesh 1.1 we can deploy a service mesh that can natively integrate with Kong Enterprise in order to create a full stack connectivity plane from gateway to mesh.

Notable Improvements in 1.1

Kong Mesh ships with the greatest and latest Kuma features, that include:

Multi-Zone 🌎

• Simplified multi-zone deployment with auto generation of “Zone” resources.
• Locality aware load-balancing to reduce multi-zone latency and reduce egress costs.
• Automatic synchronization of ingress data plane proxies to global CP via the new “Ingress” DP type.

Services & Policies 🚀

• Added support for explicit external services.
• Added support for a new “Service” resource that groups multiple data plane proxies per “kuma.io/service”.
• Added support for the Kafka protocol.
• Configurable pass-through control capabilities in a “Mesh” resource.

Performance 📊

• Battle tested in production in mission critical SLA-enforced enterprise environments.
• Significant overall performance improvements (~5x) when running tens of thousands of services in Kuma.
• Improvements in internal caching of resources to better support high data plane proxy loads.
• Improved overall scalability of the CLI and the GUI when running with a large amount of resources.

Security 🔒

• A new flow for securing data plane proxies with the control plane and locking down the communication between them.
• A new flow for starting data plane proxies and connecting them to the control plane that works better in non-K8s containerized environments.
• Added support for Kubernetes probes.
• Improved readiness checks for sidecar proxy in Kubernetes.

Other ➕

• Kuma 1.0 ships with a new GUI!
• Added over 30+ new charts available out of the box in Grafana to capture the behavior of the CP at scale. Kuma now provides over 65+ charts out of the box.
• Added support for AWS ECS and Fargate deployments.
• Upgraded to latest Envoy 1.16.0

In addition to the features above, Kong Mesh also natively provides support for 3rd party PKIs like Hashicorp Vault when setting up zero-trust security with mTLS, and a native integration with Kong Enterprise.

Kong Mesh 1.1 ships with a new – more scalable – browser GUI.

Production Mileage

Kong Mesh is today being deployed across enterprise organizations around the world to power the underlying connectivity to both legacy and modern applications running across a large variety of environments. Designed for the enterprise architect that must support all the teams in the organization, Kong Mesh ships with support SLAs, enterprise features and a full integration with the broader Kong Enterprise platform.

To learn more and get access to the enterprise case studies, you can get in touch with Kong today.