Kuma Star

Using Kuma

Kuma provides comprehensive features for securing, managing, and observing your service mesh. This section covers practical guides for implementing common patterns and configuring essential policies.

Zero trust and application security

Secure service-to-service communication and control access:

Start with mutual TLS to establish zero-trust security across your mesh.

Resiliency and reliability

Build reliable applications that handle failures gracefully:

Combine these policies to create resilient services that automatically recover from failures.

Managing incoming traffic

Configure ingress and expose services outside the mesh:

Choose built-in gateways for a consistent experience or delegated gateways to use existing infrastructure.

Monitoring and observability

Gain visibility into mesh behavior and service interactions:

Integrate with monitoring tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, or Datadog for comprehensive observability.

Traffic routing and shaping

Control how requests flow between services:

Use routing policies for traffic splitting, canary deployments, and A/B testing.

Service discovery and networking

Configure how services discover and communicate with each other:

Start with service discovery to understand how Kuma tracks services.

Common use cases

Secure microservices

  1. Enable mutual TLS for encryption
  2. Configure MeshTrafficPermission for access control
  3. Set up MeshAccessLog for audit trails

Build resilient applications

  1. Configure MeshTimeout to prevent hanging requests
  2. Enable MeshRetry for automatic retries
  3. Add MeshCircuitBreaker to prevent cascading failures
  4. Configure MeshHealthCheck to remove unhealthy instances

Expose services with ingress

  1. Choose between built-in or delegated gateways
  2. Deploy and configure gateway instances
  3. Create MeshHTTPRoute or MeshTCPRoute policies
  4. Apply security policies to gateway traffic

Monitor and debug

  1. Deploy Prometheus and Grafana for metrics
  2. Configure MeshMetric to collect data plane metrics
  3. Enable MeshTrace for distributed tracing
  4. Use Inspect API to debug policy application

Next steps