We are happy to announce the release of Kong Mesh 1.9 and Kuma 1.8! This release is packed with features and improvements such as observability for builtin Gateway, a complete rewrite of the CNI and projected service account tokens support.

In order to take advantage of the latest and greatest in service mesh, we strongly suggest [upgrading to Kong Mesh 1.9.](https://docs.konghq.com/mesh/changelog/#190)upgrading to Kong Mesh 1.9.

## Notable features:

• - Cross-Mesh gateway now also works with multi-zone. If your gateway only runs in some zones, Kuma will route traffic from other zones to zones where gateways are present.
• - We've fully rewritten the CNI to leverage our new and improved transparent-proxy.
• - Mesh Gateway (aka builtin Gateway) now has all the observability features you would expect: tracing, metrics, access logs, service map and even a Grafana dashboard.
• - Built-in gateway now supports TCP traffic, [path rewrite and header addition/removal](https://kuma.io/docs/1.8.x/policies/mesh-gateway-route/#filters)path rewrite and header addition/removal.
• - The[ retry policy](https://kuma.io/docs/1.8.x/policies/retry) retry policy now offers even more flexibility when it comes to retriable status configuration.
• - The [demo now offers the option to install a Mesh gateway](https://kuma.io/docs/1.8.x/quickstart/kubernetes/#builtin-gateways)demo now offers the option to install a Mesh gateway, improving the Kuma getting-started experience.
• - It is now possible to [filter metrics scraped from the proxy](https://kuma.io/docs/1.8.x/policies/traffic-metrics/#filter-envoy-metrics)filter metrics scraped from the proxy, which can greatly improve the performance impact of scraping metrics.
• - Our TCP TrafficLog implementation was fully rewritten to be simpler and support everything Envoy supports out of the box.
• - We now support Projected Service Account Tokens forstronger security in Kubernetes.

For more details, reference the [Kong Mesh Changelog](https://docs.konghq.com/mesh/changelog)Kong Mesh Changelog.

## Cross-Mesh Gateway is also Cross-Zone

It is possible for a Mesh to only run workloads in a subset of all the existing zones. When this happens until now, you’d need to run a gateway to this mesh in all zones that wanted to communicate with this mesh. Now Kuma will find where cross-mesh gateways are running and route traffic accordingly. This will help further simplify multi-tenant and multi-zone use cases.

Figure 1: Kuma Mesh Gateway working cross Zone

## MeshGateway improvements

We released the MeshGateway back in [Kuma 1.6](https://konghq.com/blog/kuma-1-6-0-and-kong-mesh-1-7-0-released-with-kubernetes-gateway-api-support-aws-acm-integration-and-more)Kuma 1.6 and the reception has been great. Kuma's lightweight gateway is a great complement to fully fledged gateways and is also used to facilitate inter-mesh communication.

• - We're now expanding on that functionality and offering full observability with a dedicated Grafana dashboard for MeshGateway.
• - We're also adding a lot of features to make the Gateway more feature-rich, like [supporting path rewrite and header modifications.](https://kuma.io/docs/1.8.x/policies/mesh-gateway-route/#filters)supporting path rewrite and header modifications.
• - Extra attention has been paid to production readiness of the gateway with features like connection limits, overload management and others.

Figure 2: Kuma Mesh Gateway Grafana metrics dashboard

## CNI rewrite

The [v2 version](https://kuma.io/docs/dev/networking/cni/#kuma-cni-v2)v2 version of the CNI is completely rewritten in go and has the following improvements over the previous version:

• - It has support for a taint controller which guards against a possible [race condition](https://github.com/kumahq/kuma/issues/4560)race condition between the CNI plugin and other workloads when adding new nodes in an existing cluster.
• - All logs are easily accessible via `kubectl logs` command which greatly simplifies observability
• - It uses new transparent engine implemented in [kuma-net](https://github.com/kumahq/kuma-net/)kuma-net

[Get in touch with Kong](https://konghq.com/request-demo-kong-mesh)Get in touch with Kong to learn more about Kong Mesh and how to build an enterprise service mesh. You can also [download Kong Mesh](https://docs.konghq.com/mesh/1.9.x/install)download Kong Mesh and get started for free.