Kuma is a modern enterprise-ready control plane for service mesh and microservices, on every cloud, in a single or multi-zone capacity, across both Kubernetes and VMs. Thanks to this universality, combined with native support for Envoy as its data plane proxy technology (but with no Envoy expertise required), Kuma provides modern L4-L7 service connectivity, discovery, security, observability, routing and more across any service on any platform, databases included.
Originally created by Kong, Kuma is today CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) Sandbox project and therefore available with the same openness and neutrality as every other CNCF project. Kuma has been engineered to be both powerful yet simple to use, reducing the complexity of running a service mesh across every organization with very unique capabilities like multi-zone support, multi-mesh support, and a gradual and intuitive learning curve.
Kuma runs today across mission-critical production environments across a large variety of industries, including telecommunications, financial services, e-commerce, travel and technology organizations. Users that require enterprise-level support for Kuma can explore the enterprise offerings available.
Built by Envoy contributors at Kong 🦍.
Need help? In your journey with Kuma you can get in touch with the broader community via the official Slack chat.
Installation | Documentation | Community + Slack Chat | Blog
Built with enterprise use-cases in mind, Kuma is a universal service mesh that supports both Kubernetes and VMs deployments across single and multi-zone setups, with turnkey mesh policies to get up and running easily while supporting multi-tenancy and multi-mesh on the same control plane. Kuma is a CNCF Sandbox project.
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.
Kuma has been built with universality and scalability in mind. Kubernetes and VMs are both first class citizens, it supports multiple isolated meshes on one control plane and offers global/remote CPs deployments for both single and multi zone setups across different platforms, clouds and data-centers in order to tackle the most complex deployments. With built-in connectivity thanks to the automatic ingress mode and built-in discovery, Kuma abstracts away connectivity across the entire mesh.
- 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-Mesh: To setup multiple isolated Meshes in one cluster and one Control Plane, lowering OPs cost.
- Single and Multi Zone: To deploy a service mesh that is cross-platform, cross-cloud and cross-cluster.
- Automatic Discovery & Ingress: With built-in service discovery and connectivity across single and multi-zones.
- Global & Remote CPs: For scalability across deployments with multiple zones, including hybrid VMs + K8s meshes.
- 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.
- Internal & External Services: Aggregation of internal services and support for services outside the mesh.
- 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.
- Retries: To improve application reliability by automatically retrying requests.
- 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.
- Transparent Proxying: Out of the box transparent proxying on Kubernetes, VMs and any other platform.
- 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 to explore the available offerings.
Copyright 2021 the Kuma Authors.
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
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