Kuma 1.0: Universal Service Mesh GA

Introduction

At Kong Summit 2020, Kuma 1.0 became generally available on September 9, 2020. The Envoy-powered mesh delivers consistent policy, routing, and observability across Kubernetes clusters and traditional workloads.

Multi-Zone Federation

• Global control plane coordinates traffic policies while remote zones handle data-plane configuration.
• Supports hybrid setups spanning Kubernetes clusters, VMs, and bare-metal services.
• Failover policies automatically shift traffic between zones when health checks detect issues.

Advanced Traffic Policies

1. TrafficRoute adds weighted routing, request mirroring, and retries with circuit breaking built in.
2. TrafficPermission simplifies zero-trust rules with service-to-service identity selectors.
3. FaultInjection supports latency, abort, and rate-limit scenarios for chaos experiments.

Observability Packs

• Bundled Grafana dashboards and Prometheus alerts give instant visibility into Envoy metrics.
• OpenTracing/OpenTelemetry integrations forward traces to Jaeger, Zipkin, or Datadog.
• Service map visualizations highlight policy hits, mTLS status, and error rates.

Getting Started

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

Join a universal workload:

kumactl install transparent-proxy
bin/kuma-dp run --cp-address https://global-control-plane:5679 \
  --dataplane-file backend-dp.yaml

Summary

Kuma 1.0 shows that policy, traffic management, and visibility can span every corner of the infrastructure without reinventing architectures.