We are happy to announce Kuma's latest release, which is packed with features and improvements.

We strongly suggest upgrading, in order to take advantage of the latest and greatest when it comes to service mesh.

Notable Features

• 🚀 Streamlined cross-mesh communication through Kuma's builtin gateway. There's a bit to unpack here – so we moved details to the next section.
• 🚀 Support for ARM-based Linux and MacOS environments. You can continue to connect services across your environment with Kuma as you modernize onto microservices and ARM architectures.
• 🚀 Observability implementation in one command. You can instrument metrics, traces, and logs with a single observability (opens new window) command line tool.
• 🚀 Simplified application metrics collection. You can now enable metrics collection (opens new window) from your services running without deploying Prometheus inside the mesh.
• 🚀 A way to patch injected containers (opens new window) (sidecar and init) which enables some advanced customization.
• 🚀 More graceful Data Plane Proxy shutdowns (opens new window). You won't see occasional data plane proxy error metrics from your services and sidecars as they spin down.
• Multiple Helm refinements. You can now use Helm charts to customize image tags, expose the control plane's metrics for self-deployed Prometheus scraping, and more.

And a lot more! The full changelog is available here (opens new window).

Builtin Gateway Cross-Mesh Communication

We see many application teams deploy a service mesh for each of their applications to act as a logical boundary – each service mesh ensures only the services within the mesh can communicate with each other. Traditionally, these teams deployed a Delegated Gateway (opens new window) in their mesh to facilitate cross-mesh communication and authentication. Most chose Kong Gateway, but any API Gateway can work. The challenge with this approach is that each team must operate an API Gateway and configure it to securely connect to their mesh. And, while API Gateways are critical for connectivity at the edge of any environment, their full capabilities are not needed for connectivity between service meshes within an enterprise environment. Today's release of the Builtin Gateway's cross-mesh (opens new window) lets teams expose their meshes to other meshes, while keeping all traffic secured through the data plane using mTLS. And, configure all of their listeners and routes directly using Kuma policies.

Kuma 1.6.1 and 1.5.2

We are also releasing a patch release of Kuma 1.5.x and 1.6.x with some critical bug fixes and an Envoy upgrade that contains important security fixes. Make sure to check the CHANGELOG (opens new window).

Join us on the community call!

Join us on our community channels (opens new window), including our official Slack chat, to learn more about Kuma. The community channels are useful for getting up and running with Kuma, as well as for learning how to contribute to and discuss the project roadmap. Kuma is a CNCF Sandbox project: neutral, open and inclusive.

The next community call will be hosted on April 13th at 8:30am PDT (opens new window). And don’t forget to follow Kuma on Twitter (opens new window) and star it on GitHub (opens new window)!

Upgrading

Be sure to carefully read the Upgrade Guide (opens new window) before upgrading Kuma.