Kong Inc. Donates Open Source Kuma to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

By AIT News Desk On Jun 30, 2020

The First Envoy-Based Service Mesh Control Plane Project Now Governed by the CNCF Provides Developers with Production-Ready Software for Managing and Controlling Mesh-Based Applications on Any Platform

Kong Inc., the leading cloud connectivity company, announced that it has donated open source Kuma to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF®) as a Sandbox project, becoming the first Envoy-based control plane for service mesh to be part of the foundation. The CNCF hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, and is focused on building sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software.

Based on the popular open source Envoy proxy, a graduated CNCF project, Kuma is a universal control plane that enables seamless management of any service on the network, from any platform—including Kubernetes, containers, virtual machines, bare metal and other environments. Kuma focuses on ease of use and aims to be a turnkey service mesh that can quickly provide value to production environments. It features unique capabilities such as multi-mesh support, hybrid universal mode, global/remote control plane scalability, and built-in service discovery and GUI, among other features.

“It’s truly remarkable to see the ecosystem around Envoy continue to develop, and as a vendor-neutral organization, CNCF is the ideal home for Kuma,” said Matt Klein, creator of the Envoy proxy. “Now developers have access to the service mesh data plane they love with Envoy as well as a CNCF hosted Envoy-based control plane with Kuma, offering a powerful combination to make it easier to create and manage cloud native applications.”

Since Kuma was open-sourced in September 2019, Kong has steadily improved the software through more than 10 releases and established an open governance policy for the project. Now production-ready, Kuma is at the ideal stage to be transferred to the CNCF as a Sandbox project.

“When Kong open sourced Kuma last year, our ultimate goal was to donate it to the CNCF, where it can serve the most good in the community and benefit from the brightest developer minds,” said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “The industry needs and deserves to have a cloud native, Envoy-based control plane that is open and not governed by a single commercial entity. From a technology standpoint, it makes no sense for individual companies to create their own control plane but rather build their own unique applications on proven technologies like Envoy and Kuma. We welcome the broader community to join Kuma on Slack and on our bi-weekly community calls to contribute to the project and continue the incredible momentum we have achieved so far.”

Kuma: Service Mesh for All

Kuma democratizes service mesh for organizations of all types without sacrificing advanced customization. Compared to other service meshes that are either platform-specific or hard to use and hard to scale, Kuma is designed for ease of use and enables rapid adoption of mesh by leveraging the de-facto industry sidecar proxy Envoy. Built on Envoy, Kuma can easily support all environments in the organization, including containers and virtual machines, and can run on any cloud. This enables new applications to be built in Kubernetes while existing applications can still be leveraged in their traditional environments, providing comprehensive coverage across an organization and the highest business value.

Kuma couples a fast data plane with an advanced control plane that allows users to easily secure all traffic, establish service connectivity permissions, expose metrics, logs and traces, and create routing rules with just a few commands by either using native CRDs or a RESTful API – among other features. It also ships with out-of-the-box policies for the most common service mesh use cases. The control plane is the core enabler for the service mesh that holds the master truth for all the service configurations and infinitely scales to manage tens of thousands of services across single or multi-cluster setups.