Kuma 1.9: Universal Service Mesh Maturity and Multi-Platform Excellence

Introduction

Most service meshes assume “everything is Kubernetes.” Real enterprises often aren’t there yet: you have VMs, legacy services, and hybrid connectivity that still needs mTLS, policy, and observability with a consistent control plane.

Kuma 1.9, released on October 28, 2025, doubles down on the “universal” promise—stronger multi-platform support, better policy enforcement, and performance work designed to keep the mesh operable across Kubernetes, VMs, and mixed environments.

Why this matters in practice

• Hybrid reality: one mesh model across platforms reduces “two stacks to secure and debug.”
• Policy consistency: unified enforcement helps when services cross cluster/VM boundaries.
• Operational efficiency: performance/scaling work matters when the mesh spans more than one control plane domain.

Enhanced Multi-Platform Support

• Kubernetes integration improvements provide seamless integration with Kubernetes features including automatic sidecar injection, service discovery, and namespace isolation.
• VM support enhancements enable better integration of virtual machines into the service mesh with improved discovery and connectivity.
• Multi-cluster improvements provide better connectivity and policy synchronization across multiple Kubernetes clusters.
• Hybrid deployments enable seamless service mesh deployment across Kubernetes and VM environments with unified policy management.

Policy Capabilities

1. Traffic policy improvements provide more sophisticated traffic management policies including circuit breaking, retries, and timeouts with fine-grained configuration.
2. Security policy enhancements enable comprehensive zero-trust security with mTLS, authentication, and authorization policies across platforms.
3. Observability policy improvements provide better control over metrics collection, tracing, and logging policies.
4. Policy validation provides comprehensive validation of policy configurations before enforcement to prevent misconfigurations.

Performance Optimizations

• Latency reductions minimize the overhead of service mesh operations through optimized data plane proxies and better connection management.
• Throughput improvements enable better handling of high-traffic workloads with improved connection pooling and request processing.
• Resource usage optimizations reduce CPU and memory consumption by up to 25% through better resource allocation and caching.
• Scaling improvements enable reliable operation with large numbers of services and high traffic volumes across all supported platforms.

Integration Options

• Gateway integration enables seamless integration with API gateways for unified ingress and API management.
• Observability integration provides comprehensive integration with Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger for unified observability.
• CI/CD integration enables integration with CI/CD pipelines for automated deployment and testing of service mesh configurations.
• Kubernetes operator improvements provide better lifecycle management with automatic updates and configuration synchronization.

Getting Started

# Install Kuma on Kubernetes
kubectl apply -f https://kuma.io/install.sh | sh

# Install Kuma control plane
kumactl install control-plane | kubectl apply -f -

Summary

Kuma 1.9 continues to lead universal service mesh solutions, providing teams with powerful tools for managing service-to-service communication across diverse infrastructure environments.