Set up and explore the Universal demo app

To start learning how Kuma works, you can download and run a simple demo application that consists of two services:

• demo-app: web application that lets you increment a numeric counter
• redis: data store for the counter

This guide also introduces some of the tools Kuma provides to help you control and monitor traffic, track resource status, and more.

The demo-app service listens on port 5000. When it starts, it expects to find a zone key in Redis that specifies the name of the datacenter (or cluster) where the Redis instance is running. This name is displayed in the browser.

The zone key is purely static and arbitrary. Different zone values for different Redis instances let you keep track of which Redis instance stores the counter if you manage routes across different zones, clusters, and clouds.

Prerequisites

• Redis installed
• Kuma installed

• Demo app downloaded from GitHub:

  git clone https://github.com/kumahq/kuma-counter-demo.git
  

To explore traffic metrics with the demo app, you also need to set up Prometheus. See the traffic metrics policy documentation.

Set up

1. Run redis as a daemon on port 26379 and set a default zone name:

   redis-server --port 26379 --daemonize yes
   redis-cli -p 26379 set zone local
   

2. Install and start demo-app on the default port 5000:

   npm install --prefix=app/
   npm start --prefix=app/
   

Generate tokens

Create a token for Redis and a token for the app:

kumactl generate dataplane-token --name=redis > kuma-token-redis
kumactl generate dataplane-token --name=app > kuma-token-app

Create a data plane proxy for each service

For Redis:

kuma-dp run \
  --cp-address=https://localhost:5678/ \
  --dns-enabled=false \
  --dataplane-token-file=kuma-token-redis \
  --dataplane="
  type: Dataplane
  mesh: default
  name: redis
  networking: 
    address: 0.0.0.0
    inbound: 
      - port: 16379
      servicePort: 26379
      serviceAddress: 127.0.0.1
      tags: 
        kuma.io/service: redis
        kuma.io/protocol: tcp"

And for the demo app:

kuma-dp run \
  --cp-address=https://localhost:5678/ \
  --dns-enabled=false \
  --dataplane-token-file=kuma-token-app \
  --dataplane="
  type: Dataplane
  mesh: default
  name: app
  networking: 
    address: 0.0.0.0
    outbound:
      - port: 6379
        tags:
          kuma.io/service: redis
    inbound: 
      - port: 15000
        servicePort: 5000
        serviceAddress: 127.0.0.1
        tags: 
          kuma.io/service: app
          kuma.io/protocol: http"

Run

Navigate to 127.0.0.1:5000 and increment the counter.

Explore the mesh

You can view the sidecar proxies that are connected to the Kuma control plane:

kumactl get dataplanes
# MESH      NAME                                              TAGS
# default   kuma-demo-app-68758d8d5d-dddvg.kuma-demo          app=kuma-demo-demo-app env=prod pod-template-hash=68758d8d5d protocol=http service=demo-app_kuma-demo_svc_5000 version=v8
# default   redis-master-657c58c859-5wkb4.kuma-demo           app=redis pod-template-hash=657c58c859 protocol=tcp role=master service=redis_kuma-demo_svc_6379 tier=backend

kumactl config control-planes add --name=XYZ --address=http://{address-to-kuma}:5681

Enable Mutual TLS and Traffic Permissions

By default the network is unsecure and not encrypted. We can change this with Kuma by enabling the Mutual TLS policy to provision a dynamic Certificate Authority (CA) on the default Mesh resource that will automatically assign TLS certificates to our services (more specifically to the injected dataplane proxies running alongside the services).

We can enable Mutual TLS with a builtin CA backend by executing:

cat <<EOF | kumactl apply -f -
type: Mesh
name: default
mtls:
  enabledBackend: ca-1
  backends:
  - name: ca-1
    type: builtin
EOF

Once Mutual TLS has been enabled, Kuma will not allow traffic to flow freely across our services unless we explicitly create a Traffic Permission policy that describes what services can be consumed by other services. You can try to make requests to the demo application at 127.0.0.1:5000/ and you will notice that they will not work.

We can setup a very permissive policy that allows all traffic to flow in our application in an encrypted way with the following command:

cat <<EOF | kumactl apply -f -
type: TrafficPermission
name: permission-all
mesh: default
sources:
  - match:
      kuma.io/service: '*'
destinations:
  - match:
      kuma.io/service: '*'
EOF

By doing so every request we now make on our demo application at 127.0.0.1:5000/ is not only working again, but it is automatically encrypted and secure.

Explore Traffic Metrics

One of the most important policies that Kuma provides out of the box is Traffic Metrics.

With Traffic Metrics we can leverage Prometheus and Grafana to provide powerful dashboards that visualize the overall traffic activity of our application and the status of the service mesh.

cat <<EOF | kumactl apply -f -
type: Mesh
name: default
mtls:
  enabledBackend: ca-1
  backends:
  - name: ca-1
    type: builtin
metrics:
  enabledBackend: prometheus-1
  backends:
  - name: prometheus-1
    type: prometheus
    conf:
      skipMTLS: true
EOF

This will enable the prometheus metrics backend on the default Mesh and automatically collect metrics for all of our traffic.

Increment the counter to generate traffic, and access the dashboard at 127.0.0.1:3000 with default credentials for both the username (admin) and the password (admin).

Kuma automatically installs three dashboard that are ready to use:

• Kuma Mesh: to visualize the status of the overall Mesh.
• Kuma Dataplane: to visualize metrics for a single individual dataplane.
• Kuma Service to Service: to visualize traffic metrics for our services.

You can now explore the dashboards and see the metrics being populated over time.

Next steps

• Explore the Policies available to govern and orchestrate your service traffic.
• Read the full documentation to learn about all the capabilities of Kuma.
• Chat with us at the official Kuma Slack for questions or feedback.