What is Kuma?
Kuma is a platform agnostic open-source control plane for Service Mesh and Microservices. It can run and be operated natively across both Kubernetes and VM environments, making it easy to adopt by every team in the organization.
While being simple to use for most use-cases, Kuma also provides policies to configure the underlying Envoy data-planes in a more fine-grained manner. By doing so, Kuma can be used by both first-time users of Service Mesh, as well as the most experienced ones.
Kong built Kuma with feedback from 100+ enterprise organizations running Service Mesh in production. As such, Kuma implements a pragmatic approach that is very different from other control plane implementations:
- Simple: To deploy and to use, Kuma provides easy to use policies for various use-cases.
- Envoy-based: Kuma is built on top of Envoy, the most adopted proxy for Service Mesh.
- Distributed Deployment with a global control plane and remote control planes for each underlying cluster.
Below an example of a distributed deployment, which also enables Kuma to setup a Service Mesh that runs simoultaneously on multiple Kubernetes clusters, or on a hybrid Kubernetes/VM cluster: