Kuma 1.7: Universal Service Mesh Maturity

Introduction

Kuma 1.7, released on May 30, 2023, is most relevant if you’re managing service-to-service traffic and want less operational overhead. The improvements tend to matter in production traffic management: simpler operations, stronger defaults, and better visibility without extra moving parts.

Universal Mesh Features

• Multi-platform support enables running Kuma on Kubernetes, VMs, and bare metal.
• Unified configuration provides consistent mesh policies across platforms.
• Cross-platform connectivity enables services to communicate across different platforms.
• Platform abstraction simplifies mesh management across diverse environments.

Multi-Cluster Improvements

1. Federation capabilities enable unified mesh management across multiple clusters.
2. Service discovery enhancements automatically discover services across clusters.
3. Traffic routing improvements provide better cross-cluster traffic management.
4. Security enhancements enable secure communication across cluster boundaries.

Observability Enhancements

• Metrics expansion exposes detailed service mesh metrics for Prometheus.
• Tracing improvements provide better distributed tracing capabilities.
• Logging enhancements enable better log aggregation and analysis.
• Dashboard integration provides visualization of mesh topology and health.

Getting Started

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kumahq/kuma/releases/download/1.7.0/kuma-cp.yaml

Enable Kuma for a namespace:

kubectl annotate namespace default kuma.io/sidecar-injection=enabled

Summary

Kuma 1.7 provides teams with comprehensive service mesh capabilities across diverse platforms with improved multi-cluster support.