DEVOPSdigest

Kong announced a significant upgrade to open source Kuma, Kuma 0.6, available today.

The centerpiece of Kuma 0.6 is its hybrid universal mode designed to enable Kuma service meshes to support complex applications running across heterogeneous environments, including VMs, multiple Kubernetes clusters and multiple data centers. Built to meet enterprise service mesh requirements out-of-the-box, Kuma will help accelerate an organization’s digital transformation and increase business agility by making it easier to manage, secure and govern connectivity across the entire organization.

The new release of Kuma is uniquely designed for broad enterprise adoption and to meet the needs of organizations with heterogeneous network and application architectures.

Based on the popular open source Envoy proxy, Kuma provides the most portable, secure and robust control plane for service mesh available in the industry. It enables comprehensive visibility and simplified management of service mesh workloads running on any platform and in multiple data centers as if they were running in one cluster to provide a scalable solution for hybrid workloads.

Previous versions of Kuma supported a simple universal mode, with a flat networking requirement, which is ideal for greenfield environments that do not require integration with legacy systems. Because most enterprises have complex networks composed of old and new application infrastructure, Kuma’s new hybrid universal mode makes it fast and easy for technology teams to quickly implement and derive value from service meshes deployed across their organization.

Key features of Kuma 0.6 include:

- Automated Service Connectivity: By automating and abstracting service mesh connectivity across all enterprise environments and platforms, hybrid universal service meshes across the entire organization work out-of-the-box.

- Advanced Control Plane Replication: New support for global/remote control plane replication improves scalability and operational visibility across multiple platforms and clusters with hundreds of thousands of data plane proxies.

- New Ingress Data Plane Resource: A new ingress data plane mode can automate cross-platform and cross-cluster service mesh communication out-of-the-box, which is notoriously hard to implement manually and can take months.

- DNS Service Discovery: A native universal DNS service discovery API abstracts away underlying services running across multiple platforms and clusters as if they were running in one cluster.

- Hybrid Multi-Mesh Support: The new hybrid universal mode can run in the native multi-tenant and multi-mesh mode that Kuma already supports, allowing the organization to create flexible service meshes for any use-case.

Kuma 0.6 features a new hybrid universal mode, support for global/remote control plane replication, a new ingress data plane and multi-zone DNS service discovery

“A service mesh is more valuable as the number of services grows. Managing an enterprise network with new and old applications running on both new and old platforms, combined with a rapidly growing number of service-driven applications, presents technology leaders with an overwhelming task fraught with hidden risks, limited visibility, and insecure and unreliable connection points that are hard to pinpoint,” said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “Service mesh was designed to precisely solve this problem, but solutions weren’t ready for enterprise prime-time – until now. With Kuma 0.6, we’re providing an out-of-the-box solution built for the most demanding enterprise mesh requirements that removes the complexity and automates the hard parts so that organizations can reap the benefits of service mesh.“

Kong donated open source Kuma to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox project, becoming the first Envoy-based control plane for service mesh to be part of the foundation. The CNCF hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, and is focused on building sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software.

Since Kuma was open sourced in September 2019, Kong has steadily improved the software through more than 10 releases and established an open governance policy for the project. Now production-ready, Kuma is at the ideal stage to be transferred to the CNCF as a Sandbox project.

“When Kong open sourced Kuma last year, our ultimate goal was to donate it to the CNCF, where it can serve the most good in the community and benefit from the brightest developer minds,” said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “The industry needs and deserves to have a cloud native, Envoy-based control plane that is open and not governed by a single commercial entity. From a technology standpoint, it makes no sense for individual companies to create their own control plane but rather build their own unique applications on proven technologies like Envoy and Kuma. We welcome the broader community to join Kuma on Slack and on our bi-weekly community calls to contribute to the project and continue the incredible momentum we have achieved so far.”