Kuma is an open-source control plane for service mesh that is built on top of Envoy, which is an open-source service proxy.
It features an out-of-the-box L4 and L7 policy architecture, allowing users to quickly set it up and enable zero trust security, observability, discovery, routing, and traffic reliability.
Other features include multi-zone deployment for multi-cloud and multi-cluster, horizontal scalability, and more.
The project was first developed by Kong and then donated to the CNCF, where it is currently a sandbox project.
“Kuma has been engineered to be both powerful yet simple to use, reducing the complexity of running a service mesh across every organization with very unique capabilities like multi-zone support, multi-mesh support, and a gradual and intuitive learning curve,” the project’s GitHub page states.
The most current version of Kuma is 1.4.1, which added features like a simpler way to manage tokens and automatic tagging of Pods with the Pod’s namespace, which makes it easier to build policies around pods.
