Kuma

Kuma is a universal open-source control plane for service mesh and microservices management, developed by Kong Inc. (the company behind the Kong API Gateway). With over 6,100 stars as of 2026, Kuma is designed as a modern, platform-agnostic service mesh that works across Kubernetes, VMs, and bare metal, unlike Istio which is Kubernetes-centric. Kuma is built on top of Envoy proxy (using Envoy as the universal data plane) and provides a simplified control plane that makes service mesh technology accessible to a broader range of users. Key features include: multi-zone support (running a single service mesh across multiple Kubernetes clusters, VMs, and cloud providers with automatic service discovery and routing across zones), universal platform support (works on Kubernetes via CRDs and on VMs/bare metal via a REST API, enabling hybrid environments with containerized and non-containerized workloads), mTLS encryption (automatically encrypting all inter-service traffic with mutual TLS using self-signed or external CA certificates), traffic routing (weighted routing, traffic splitting for canary deployments, and path-based routing), traffic metrics (exposing Prometheus-compatible metrics for service-level observability including request volume, latency, error rate), circuit breaking (protecting services from cascading failures with configurable connection and request limits), health checks (active and passive health checking with automatic endpoint removal), retry and timeout policies, proxy template (customizing Envoy configuration for advanced use cases), external services (integrating services outside the mesh like managed databases and third-party APIs), multi-mesh support (running multiple isolated meshes on the same infrastructure), and kumactl CLI for management.