Kuma is a platform agnostic open-source control plane for Service Mesh and Microservices. It can run and be operated natively across both Kubernetes and VM environments, making it easy to adopt by every team in the organization.
Bundling Envoy as a data-plane, Kuma can instrument any L4/L7 traffic to secure, observe, route and enhance connectivity between any service or database. It can be used natively in Kubernetes via CRDs or via a RESTful API across other environments like VMs and Bare Metal.
While being simple to use for most use-cases, Kuma also provides policies to configure the underlying Envoy data-planes in a more fine-grained manner. By doing so, Kuma can be used by both first-time users of Service Mesh, as well as the most experienced ones.
Built by Envoy contributors at Kong 🦍.
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Modern applications will inevitably make requests over a network to communicate to other services, like databases, caches or microservices. But - as we all know - the network is by default unreliable and unsecure, and can introduce significant challenges to any modern environment like security, tracing and routing among the others.
Kuma is a better way to build L4/L7 connectivity among your services and applications (Service Mesh) by reducing the code that application teams have to write, enabling to ship products faster and improve the reliability and security of the overall architecture with minimal effort.
Kuma embraces the sidecar proxy model by bundling Envoy as its sidecar data-plane technology and by providing a platform-agnostic Control Plane that can run on both modern Kubernetes and existing VM/Bare Metal architectures in order to deliver business value across every team in the organization with one comprehensive solution.
- Universal Control Plane: Easy to use, distributed, runs anywhere on both Kubernetes and VM/Bare Metal.
- Lightweight Data Plane: Powered by Envoy to process any L4/L7 traffic, with automatic Envoy bootstrapping.
- Automatic DP Injection: No code changes required in K8s. Easy YAML specification for VM and Bare Metal deployments.
- Multi-Tenancy: To setup multiple isolated Meshes in one cluster and one Control Plane, lowering OPs cost.
- mTLS: Automatic mTLS issuing, identity and encryption with optional support for third-party CA.
- TLS Rotation: Automatic certificate rotation for all the data planes, with configurable settings.
- Traffic Permissions: To firewall traffic between the services of a Mesh.
- Traffic Routing: With dynamic load-balancing for blue/green, canary, versioning and rollback deployments.
- Fault Injection: To harden our systems by injecting controlled artificial faults and observe the behavior.
- Traffic Logs: To log all the activity to a third-party service, like Splunk or ELK.
- Traffic Tracing: To observe the full trace of the service traffic and determine bottlenecks.
- Traffic Metrics: For every Envoy dataplane managed by Kuma with native Prometheus/Grafana support.
- Proxy Configuration Templating: The easiest way to run and configure Envoy with low-level configuration.
- Gateway Support: To support any API Gateway or Ingress, like Kong Gateway.
- Healthchecks: Both active and passive.
- GUI: Out of the box browser GUI to explore all the Service Meshes configured in the system.
- Tagging Selectors: To apply sophisticated regional, cloud-specific and team-oriented policies.
- Platform-Agnostic: Support for Kubernetes, VMs, and bare metal. Including hybrid deployments.
- Network Overlay: Create a configurable Mesh overlay across different Kubernetes clusters and namespaces.
Below you can find a snapshot of the GUI that ships with Kuma:
Kuma is a platform-agnostic product that ships in different distributions. You can explore the available installation options at the official website.
You can use Kuma for modern greenfield applications built on containers as well as existing applications running on more traditional infrastructure. Kuma can be fully configured via CRDs (Custom Resource Definitions) on Kubernetes and via a RESTful HTTP API in other environments that can be easily integrated with CI/CD workflows.
Kuma also provides an easy to use kumactl CLI client for every environment, and an official GUI that can be accessed by the browser.
Kuma is under active development and production-ready.
See Developer Guide for further details.
If you are implementing Kuma in a mission-critical environment and require Enterprise support and features, please visit Enterprise and get in touch with Kong.
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