When we first created Kuma – which means “bear” in Japanese – we dreamed of creating a service mesh that could run across every cluster, every cloud and every application. These are all requirements that large organizations must implement to support their application teams across a wide variety of architectures and platforms: VMs, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP and so on.
As a network of microservices changes and grows, the interactions between them can be difficult to manage and understand. That’s why it’s handy to have a service mesh as a separate infrastructure layer. A service mesh is an approach to solving microservices at scale. It handles routing and terminating traffic, monitoring and tracing, service delivery and routing, load balancing, circuit breaking and mutual authentication.
We are happy to announce the general availability of Kong Mesh 1.0! Kong Mesh is Kong’s first enterprise service mesh built on top of Kuma and Envoy that organizations can use to deploy a modern mesh across every application — running on both Kubernetes and VMs — and on every cloud or data-center.
We are happy to announce the much-anticipated Kuma 0.6 release! This new release ships with major improvements, especially when it comes to supporting service meshes that can span across multiple clouds, multiple Kubernetes clusters and hybrid platforms (Kubernetes + VMs) in enterprise environments. Kuma has also been donated to the CNCF as a Sandbox project: the first Envoy-based service mesh to ever be donated to the foundation. Let’s unwrap these announcements.
Kubernetes doesn’t come with built-in monitoring capabilities. Instead, it relies on the open source ecosystem to build tools for vital operational tasks like monitoring. CNCF is the governing body that oversees the development of such projects. Two of the most successful CNCF projects to date are Prometheus and Istio. Prometheus for monitoring, and Istio to manage network communication in the form of a service mesh.
Among forward-looking software developers, Envoy has become ubiquitous as a high-performance pluggable proxy, providing improved networking and observability capability for increased services traffic. Built on the learnings of HAProxy and nginx, Envoy is now an official Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, and has many fans—including among users of our Apigee API management platform.
The Istio service mesh continues its quarterly release cadence with version 1.6. After major changes in release 1.5 to the control plane architecture, notably moving from a set of microservices to a monolithic Istiod service, and the introduction of a new, unified model for extending Istio and its Envoy proxies using WebAssembly, Istio 1.6 may seem tame in comparison, but it still offers a large number of smaller enhancements with a focus on operability. We will look at several of the highlights.
