Protocol support in Kuma

At its core, Kuma distinguishes between the following major categories of traffic: http, grpc, kafka and opaque tcp traffic.

For http, grpc and kafka traffic Kuma provides deep insights down to application-level transactions, in the latter tcp case the observability is limited to connection-level statistics.

So, as a user of Kuma, you're highly encouraged to give it a hint whether your service supports http , grpc, kafka or not.

By doing this,

• you will get reacher metrics with Traffic Metrics policy
• you will get reacher logs with Traffic Log policy
• you will be able to use Traffic Trace policy

On Kubernetes, to give Kuma a hint that your service supports HTTP protocol, you need to add a <port>.service.kuma.io/protocol annotation to the k8s Service object.

E.g.,

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: web
  namespace: kuma-example
  annotations:
    8080.service.kuma.io/protocol: http # let Kuma know that your service supports HTTP protocol
spec:
  selector:
    app: web
  ports:
  - port: 8080

On Universal, to give Kuma a hint that your service supports the http protocol, you need to add a kuma.io/protocol tag to the inbound interface of your Dataplane.

E.g.,

type: Dataplane
mesh: default
name: web
networking:
  address: 192.168.0.1 
  inbound:
  - port: 80
    servicePort: 8080
    tags:
      kuma.io/service: web
      kuma.io/protocol: http # let Kuma know that your service supports HTTP protocol

HTTP/2 support

Kuma by default upgrades connection between Dataplanes to HTTP/2. If you want to enable HTTP/2 on connections between a dataplane and an application, use kuma.io/protocol: http2 tag.