Kuma 1.8 Released with Gateway GA, new CNI and many improvements!

We are happy to announce the release of Kuma 1.8! This release is packed with features and improvements such as observability for builtin Gateway, complete rewrite of the CNI and projected service account tokens support and much more! In order to take advantage of the latest and greatest in service mesh, we strongly suggest upgrading.

Notable Features

• 🚀 Cross-Mesh gateway now also works with multi-zone. If your gateway only runs in some zones, Kuma will route traffic from other zones to zones where gateways are present.
• 🚀 Mesh Gateway (aka builtin Gateway) now has all the observability features you would expect: tracing, metrics, access logs, service map and even a Grafana dashboard.
• 🚀 We’ve fully rewritten the CNI to leverage our new and improved transparent-proxy.
• 🚀 The retry policy now offers even more flexibility when it comes to retriable status configuration.
• 🚀 Mesh Gateway now supports path rewrite and header addition/removal.
• 🚀 The demo now offers the option to install a Mesh gateway, improving the Kuma getting-started experience.
• 🚀 It is now possible to filter metrics scraped from the proxy, which can greatly improve the performance impact of scraping metrics.
• 🚀 Our TCP TrafficLog implementation was fully rewritten to be simpler and support everything Envoy supports out of the box.
• 🚀 We now support Projected Service Account Tokens for stronger security in Kubernetes.

And a lot more! Checkout the full release notes to see everything in this release.

Cross-Mesh Gateway is now also Cross-Zone

It is possible for a Mesh to only run workloads in a subset of all the existing zones. When this happens until now you’d need to run a gateway to this mesh in all zones that wanted to communicate with this mesh. Now Kuma will find where cross-mesh gateways are running and route traffic accordingly. This will help further simplify multi-tenant and multi-zone use-cases.

MeshGateway improvements

We released the MeshGateway back in Kuma 1.6 and the reception has been great. Kuma’s lightweight gateway is a great complement to fully fledged gateways and is also used to facilitate inter-mesh communication.

These are the most significant changes in the MeshGateway:

• We’re now expanding on that functionality and offering full observability with a dedicated Grafana dashboard for MeshGateway.
• We’re also adding a lot of features to make the Gateway more feature-rich, like supporting path rewrite and header modifications.
• Extra attention has been paid to production readiness of the gateway with features like connection limits, overload management and others.

CNI rewrite

The v2 version of the CNI is completely rewritten in go and has the following improvements over the previous version:

• It has support for a taint controller which guards against a possible race condition between the CNI plugin and other workloads when adding new nodes in an existing cluster.
• All logs are easily accessible via kubectl logs command which greatly simplifies observability
• It uses new transparent engine implemented in kuma-net

  Want to always live on the edge? Try preview releases!

We are shipping artifacts with every commit of Kuma that passes our e2e tests for a few months. This is useful for people to try out features early or to verify bug fixes work accordingly.

Up until now, finding these releases was tricky and unintuitive. Not anymore, as we’ve now added everything in a simple script:

curl https://kuma.io/installer.sh | VERSION= sh - or checkout the contribute docs.

Join us on the community call!

Join us on our community channels, including our official Slack chat, to learn more about Kuma. The community channels are useful for getting up and running with Kuma, as well as for learning how to contribute to and discuss the project roadmap. Kuma is a CNCF Sandbox project: neutral, open and inclusive.

The community call is hosted on the second Wednesday of every Month at 8:30am PDT. And don’t forget to follow Kuma on Twitter and star it on GitHub!

Upgrading

Be sure to carefully read the Upgrade Guide before upgrading Kuma.