Kuma is a free, open-source control plane for managing service meshes and microservices across Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare-metal environments. It can run in single-zone or multi-zone deployments spanning clouds, regions, and Kubernetes clusters, while one control plane can serve multiple individual meshes. Its traffic policies cover HTTP and TCP routing, health checks, circuit breaking, retries, timeouts, fault injection, and rate limiting. Security features include mutual TLS and mesh traffic permissions. For observability, Kuma provides service maps, traces, access logs, metrics, and OpenTelemetry, with integrations described for Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, and Datadog. Interfaces include Kubernetes CRDs, a GUI, REST API, and CLI; Envoy is bundled as the data-plane proxy. Kuma is self-hosted, and its open-source plan is listed at 0.00 USD per free. The Kubernetes quickstart describes the GUI as read-only. Production guidance addresses secrets management, API access and authentication, certificates, proxy membership, and Kubernetes RBAC.
Who it is for
Kuma suits teams managing service meshes across Kubernetes, VMs, and bare metal. It also supports organizations that need multiple meshes under a single control plane.
What is good
- Supports Kubernetes, VMs, and bare-metal environments.
- One control plane can serve multiple meshes.
- Includes mutual TLS and mesh traffic permissions.
- Provides a REST API, CLI, GUI, and Kubernetes CRDs.
- Open-source plan costs 0.00 USD per free.
What to know first
- Kuma is self-hosted.
- The Kubernetes quickstart describes the GUI as read-only.
- Production setup involves secrets, access controls, and certificates.
Verdict
Kuma offers traffic management, security, and observability features across several deployment environments. Note that it is self-hosted and the GUI is read-only in the Kubernetes quickstart.
Kuma plans and pricing
All plansCompared on service mesh platforms
- Deployment model
- self_hosted
- Proxy architecture
- sidecar
- mTLS support
- Yes
- Traffic policies
- Yes
- Multi-cluster support
- Yes
- Supported platforms
- Kubernetes, OpenShift, Universal (VMs), bare metal
