Kong Releases New Version of Kuma to Bring Service Mesh to Hybrid Workloads

Kuma 0.6s New Hybrid Universal Mode Allows Service Meshes to Run and Communicate Simultaneously on VMs and Kubernetes Clusters Out-of-the-Box

SAN FRANCISCO, June 30, 2020Kong Inc., the leading cloud connectivity company, today announced a significant upgrade to open source Kuma, the universal service mesh originally released in September 2019. The centerpiece of Kuma 0.6 is its powerful hybrid universal mode designed to enable Kuma service meshes to support complex applications running across heterogeneous environments, including VMs, multiple Kubernetes clusters and multiple data centers. Built to meet enterprise service mesh requirements out-of-the-box, Kuma will help accelerate an organizations digital transformation and increase business agility by making it easier to manage, secure and govern connectivity across the entire organization.

IDC predicts global digital transformation spend will reach$2.3 trillion in 2023and account for more than 50 percent of information and communications technology spend. Organizations across industries are transitioning to distributed architectures and service-driven applications. This has given rise to theservice mesh infrastructure ecosystem, which has seen significant investment, vendor support and technology innovation over the past 18 months. The new release of Kuma is uniquely designed for broad enterprise adoption and to meet the needs of organizations with heterogeneous network and application architectures.

Based on the popular open source Envoy proxy, Kuma provides the most portable, secure and robust control plane for service mesh available in the industry. It enables comprehensive visibility and simplified management of service mesh workloads running on any platform and in multiple data centers as if they were running in one cluster to provide a scalable solution for hybrid workloads. Kuma is the first Envoy-based service mesh control plane project now governed by the CNCF (see related press release issued today). To download Kuma 0.6, please visit https://kuma.io/.

Introducing Hybrid Universal Mode for Complex Service Meshes

Previous versions of Kuma supported a simple universal mode, with a flat networking requirement, which is ideal for greenfield environments that do not require integration with legacy systems. Because most enterprises have complex networks composed of old and new application infrastructure, Kumas new hybrid universal mode makes it fast and easy for technology teams to quickly implement and derive value from service meshes deployed across their organization. Key features of Kuma 0.6 include:

• Automated Service Connectivity: By automating and abstracting service mesh connectivity across all enterprise environments and platforms, hybrid universal service meshes across the entire organization work out-of-the-box.
• Advanced Control Plane Replication:New support for global/remote control plane replication improves scalability and operational visibility across multiple platforms and clusters with hundreds of thousands of data plane proxies.
• New Ingress Data Plane Resource: A new ingress data plane mode can automate cross-platform and cross-cluster service mesh communication out-of-the-box, which is notoriously hard to implement manually and can take months.
• DNS Service Discovery: A native universal DNS service discovery API abstracts away underlying services running across multiple platforms and clusters as if they were running in one cluster.
• Hybrid Multi-Mesh Support:The new hybrid universal mode can run in the native multi-tenant and multi-mesh mode that Kuma already supports, allowing the organization to create flexible service meshes for any use-case.

Kuma 0.6 features a new hybrid universal mode, support for global/remote control plane replication, a new ingress data plane and multi-zone DNS service discovery

With Kuma, TELUS Digital will be able to deliver the fast, secure and innovative solutions that our customers require, said Luca Maraschi, chief architect at TELUS Digital. "One of the many things we love about Kuma is that it abstracts away the complexity and fully supports our zero-trust network. Because TELUS Digital lives in the cloud, security is of the utmost importance and Kuma enables us to enforce zero-trust networking policy in a simple way. We also plan to expand our use of Kuma across the organization to accelerate Telus' broader digital transformation in the coming months."

A service mesh is more valuable as the number of services grows. Managing an enterprise network with new and old applications running on both new and old platforms, combined with a rapidly growing number of service-driven applications, presents technology leaders with an overwhelming task fraught with hidden risks, limited visibility, and insecure and unreliable connection points that are hard to pinpoint, said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong Inc. Service mesh was designed to precisely solve this problem, but solutions werent ready for enterprise prime-time until now. With Kuma 0.6, were providing an out-of-the-box solution built for the most demanding enterprise mesh requirements that removes the complexity and automates the hard parts so that organizations can reap the benefits of service mesh.

Availability

Kuma 0.6 is available for download today at: https://kuma.io/.

Modern infrastructure is open source, and open source has always been part of Kongs DNA. To further strengthen Kongs commitment to open source, Kuma is now the only Envoy-based service mesh in the industry with an open governance contribution model. Architects and developers from all over the world can be part of Kumas development by joining the bi-weekly Kuma community calls at https://kuma.io/community/.

About Kuma

Based on the popular open source Envoy proxy, Kuma is a universal control plane that addresses limitations of first-generation service mesh technologies in modern enterprise environments by enabling seamless management and connectivity between any L4/L7 service running across any environment. Focused on ease of use, Kuma runs on any platform including Kubernetes, containers, virtual machines and bare metal and includes a bundled data plane and advanced control plane solution with out-of-the-box policies for security, encryption, traffic control, observability and routing, among others. By supporting every service in the organization, Kuma drives greater value from an enterprise service mesh, improving security in the organization while reducing connectivity costs.

About Kong Inc.

Kong creates software that connects APIs and microservices natively across and within clouds, Kubernetes, data centers and more using intelligent automation. Built on an open source core, Kongs solutions enable digital innovation by allowing organizations to reliably and securely manage the full lifecycle of APIs and services for modern architectures including microservices, serverless and service mesh. By providing developer teams with unprecedented architectural freedom, Kong accelerates innovation cycles, increases productivity, and seamlessly bridges legacy and modern systems and applications. For more information about Kong, please visit konghq.com or follow @thekonginc on Twitter.