Today is a big day for Kuma! Kuma 1.0 is now generally available with over 70 features and improvements ready to use and deploy in production to create modern distributed service meshes for every application running on multiple clusters, clouds, including Kubernetes and VM-based workloads.

Before we unpack this release, a big thank you to the community and to the users that have helped releasing this major version of Kuma with their contributions and feedback.

Don’t forget to follow Kuma on GitHub and ask any questions on the community slack.

Kuma 1.0 ships with 65+ charts out of the box for Grafana, although you can collect data from any other system too with the TrafficLog and TrafficMetrics policies.

Notable Improvements in 1.0

This new version comes with significant new capabilities and improvements around the following areas:

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

And much more! For a complete list of features and updates, take a look at the full changelog.

Kuma 1.0 ships with a new – more scalable – browser GUI.

Community Calls + Slack

Join us on our community channels to learn more about Kuma, including our official Slack chat! The community channels are useful to get up and running with Kuma, as well as to learn how to contribute to and discuss the project roadmap. Kuma is a CNCF Sandbox project, and we welcome everybody to contribute and ask questions.

The next community call will be hosted on November 25th at 8:30am PST. Also don’t forget to follow Kuma on Twitter!

Upgrading

Be sure to carefully read the Upgrade Guide before upgrading Kuma.