Overview of Kuma

Kuma is a platform agnostic open-source control plane for service mesh and microservices management, with support for Kubernetes, VM, and bare metal environments.

Kuma helps implement a service mesh approach to distributed deployments as part of the move from monolithic architectures to microservices. You can run a service mesh with Kuma before you start decomposing your monolith, which helps keep your network secure and observable as your architecture changes. Kuma is:

• Universal and Kubernetes-native: Platform-agnostic, can run and operate anywhere.
• Standalone and multi-zone: Supports multiple clouds, regions, and Kubernetes clusters with native DNS service discovery and ingress capability.
  • Read more about standalone deployments
  • Read more about multi-zone deployments
• Multi-mesh: Supports multiple individual meshes with one control plane, lowering the operational costs of supporting the entire organization.
• Attribute-based policies: Let you apply fine grained service and traffic policies with any arbitrary tag selector for sources and destinations.
• Envoy-based: Powered by Envoy sidecar proxies, without exposing the complexity of Envoy itself.
• Horizontally scalable
• Enterprise-ready: Supports mission critical enterprise use cases that require uptime and stability.

Bundling Envoy as the data plane, Kuma can instrument any L4/L7 traffic to secure, observe, route and enhance connectivity between any services or databases. It can be used natively in Kubernetes via CRDs or via a RESTful API across other environments.

Example of a multi-zone deployment for multiple Kubernetes clusters, or a hybrid Kubernetes/VM cluster:

The core maintainer of Kuma is Kong, the maker of the popular open-source Kong Gateway 🦍.