The latest release of Kong Mesh (version 2.5) brings many new features that push the envelope and make Kong Mesh the logical choice of a service mesh to meet your objectives.

In this blog, we'll break down these new features and provide tailored use cases to illustrate how Kong Mesh 2.5 can elevate your service mesh experience. We'll focus on three main categories: flexibility, resiliency, and security.

Flexibility: Delta KDS as default

In the realm of flexibility, Kong Mesh 2.5 introduces the default adoption of Delta KDS (Key Discovery Service), offering a range of use cases:

1. Resource efficiency: For organizations dealing with a high volume of services and frequent changes, Delta KDS optimizes resource synchronization. It sends only the necessary changes, reducing the overhead of syncing the entire environment and ensuring resource efficiency.
2. Performance enhancement: In environments where low-latency communication and fast resource updates are crucial, Delta KDS excels. It significantly improves the performance of the service mesh, making it ideal for workloads that demand fast and efficient communication.
3. Scalability: Rapidly growing service mesh deployments can benefit from Delta KDS. It ensures scalability by reducing the resource synchronization overhead, thereby reducing the need to worry about scaling, with Delta KDS being the default option. 

Resiliency: Locality-aware load balancing

Resiliency is more than maintaining application availability regardless of technical or environmental challenges. It's also about the financial and compliance resilience needed to keep the organization healthy and prosperous. In Kong Mesh 2.5, we introduced locality-aware load balancing to address each issue head-on. 

1. Reliability: Organizations with services distributed across multiple zones require a high level of availability. Cross-zone load balancing ensures that, in the event of a failure, traffic can be redirected to a reliable zone. It's a valuable feature for service redundancy and ensuring uninterrupted service.
2. Cost optimization: If your organization operates in cloud environments with zone-based pricing and aims to minimize data transfer costs, locality-aware load balancing within a zone is your go-to feature. It helps keep traffic within the same zone, reducing data transfer fees.
3. Compliance: In cases where regulatory compliance or data security is paramount, cross-zone load balancing in Kong Mesh 2.5 allows you to set strict routing rules. This ensures traffic adheres to specific security standards, helping your organization maintain data sovereignty and comply with regulations.

Security: Reachable services inference through MeshTrafficPermission

Lastly, dovetailing compliance into security lets explore how Reachable Services Inference through MeshTrafficPermission enhances your security posture:

1. Configuration management: In environments with a growing number of services, managing proxy configurations can become complex and error-prone. MeshTrafficPermission simplifies configuration by automatically pruning unreachable services. This reduces configuration management overhead and ensures a more streamlined setup.
2. Performance improvement: MeshTrafficPermission also significantly enhances the performance of your service mesh. By reducing the configuration size and complexity, this feature leads to faster proxy responses, improving overall efficiency. It's a valuable asset for organizations that require peak performance in their service mesh.

Conclusion

Kong Mesh 2.5 offers a powerful toolset tailored to your organization's objectives. Whether you need resource efficiency, reliability, cost optimization, compliance, or enhanced security, Kong Mesh has the features to address your specific use cases.

Take advantage of these innovations to take your organization to the next level. With Kong Mesh 2.5, you can achieve a service mesh environment that aligns perfectly with your unique requirements and objectives.

Want to see Kong Mesh in action? Request a demo or download Kong Mesh today.