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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 richer metrics with
Traffic Metricspolicy - you will get richer logs with
Traffic Logpolicy - you will be able to use
Traffic Tracepolicy
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
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.
TLS support
Whenever a service already initiates a TLS request to another service - and mutual TLS is enabled - Kuma can enforce both TLS connections end-to-end as long as the service that is generating the TLS traffic is explicitly tagged with tcp protocol (ie: kuma.io/protocol: tcp).
Effectively kuma-dp will send the raw original TLS request as-is to the final destination, while in the meanwhile it will be enforcing its own TLS connection (if mutual TLS is enabled). Hence, the traffic must be marked as being tcp, so kuma-dp won’t try to parse it.
Note that in this case no advanced HTTP or GRPC statistics or logging are available. As a best practice - since Kuma will already secure the traffic across services via the mutual TLS policy - we suggest disabling TLS in the original services in order to get L7 metrics and capabilities.
Websocket support
Kuma out of the box support’s Websocket protocol. The service exposing Websocket should be annotated with kuma.io/protocol: tcp annotation
As Websockets use pure TCP connections under the hood, your service have to be recognised by Kuma as the TCP one. It’s also the default behavior for Kuma to assume the service’s inbound interfaces are the TCP ones, so you don’t have to do anything, but if you want to be explicit, you can annotate your services exposing Websocket endpoints with kuma.io/protocol: tcp annotation. I.e.:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: websocket-server
namespace: kuma-example
annotations:
8080.service.kuma.io/protocol: tcp
spec:
selector:
app: websocket-server
ports:
- port: 8080