Kuma 1.3: Universal Service Mesh Maturity

Introduction

Kuma 1.3 — Universal Service Mesh Maturity — was released on June 1, 2021.

Edge and east-west traffic paths tend to be where reliability and security issues show up first — so small gateway and proxy changes can have outsized impact.

In this release: Kuma 1.3 enhances universal service mesh capabilities with improved multi-zone support, better observability, and enhanced Kubernetes integration.

Multi-Zone Enhancements

• Zone synchronization improvements enable faster policy propagation across zones.
• Failover policies enhancements provide more sophisticated traffic routing during zone failures.
• Cross-zone communication optimizations reduce latency for inter-zone service calls.
• Zone health monitoring provides better visibility into zone status and connectivity.

Observability Improvements

1. Metrics expansion exposes more detailed service mesh metrics for Prometheus integration.
2. Tracing enhancements improve distributed tracing with better correlation across services.
3. Service map visualization provides real-time topology views of service communication.
4. Log aggregation improvements enable centralized logging for all mesh traffic.

Kubernetes Integration

• CRD improvements provide better Kubernetes-native resource definitions for mesh policies.
• Operator enhancements simplify mesh deployment and management in Kubernetes.
• RBAC integration enables fine-grained access control for mesh configuration.
• Helm charts improvements simplify installation and upgrades.

Policy & Security

• Traffic policies refinements provide more expressive routing and load balancing rules.
• Security policies enhancements improve mTLS configuration and certificate management.
• Rate limiting improvements enable more sophisticated throttling strategies.
• Circuit breaking enhancements provide better resilience during service failures.

Getting Started

kumactl install control-plane | kubectl apply -f -
kubectl apply -f kuma-demo.yaml

Summary

Kuma 1.3 demonstrates continued maturity in the service mesh space, providing teams with a universal solution for managing service-to-service communication.