Networking

Kuma - being an application that wants to improve the underlying connectivity between your services by making the underlying network more reliable - also comes with some networking requirements itself.

kuma-cp ports

First and foremost, the kuma-cp application is a server that offers a number of services - some meant for internal consumption by kuma-dp data-planes, some meant for external consumption by kumactl CLI, by the HTTP API or by the GUI.

When kuma-cp starts up, by default it listens on a few ports:

• 5676: the Monitoring Assignment server that responds to discovery requests from monitoring tools, such as Prometheus, that are looking for a list of targets to scrape metrics from, e.g. a list of all dataplanes in the mesh.
• 5677: the SDS server being used for propagating mTLS certificates across the data-planes.
• 5678: the xDS gRPC server implementation that the data-planes will use to retrieve their configuration.
• 5679: the Admin Server that serves Dataplane Tokens and manages Provided Certificate Authority
• 5680: the HTTP server that returns the health status of the control-plane.
• 5681: the HTTP API server that is being used by kumactl, and that you can also use to retrieve Kuma’s policies and - when running in universal - that you can use to apply new policies.
• 5682: the HTTP server that provides the Envoy bootstrap configuration when the data-plane starts up.
• 5683: the HTTP server that exposes Kuma UI.

kuma-dp ports

When we start a data-plane via kuma-dp we expect all the inbound and outbound service traffic to go through it. The inbound and outbound ports are defined in the dataplane specification when running in universal mode, while on Kubernetes the service-to-service traffic always runs on port 15001.

In addition to the service traffic ports, the data-plane automatically also opens the envoy administration interface listener on the following addresses:

• On Kubernetes, by default at 127.0.0.1:9901.
• On Universal, by default on the first available port greater or equal than 30001, like 127.0.01:30001.

The Envoy administration interface can also be manually configured to listen on any arbitraty port by specifying the --admin-port argument when running kuma-dp.

Service Discovery

Here we are going to be exploring the communication between kuma-dp and kuma-cp, and the communication between multiple kuma-dp to handle our service traffic.

Every time a data-plane (served by kuma-dp) connects to the control-plane, it initiates a gRPC streaming connection to Kuma (served by kuma-cp) in order to retrieve the latest policiy configuration, and send diagnostic information to the control-plane.

The connection between the data-planes and the control-plane is not on the execution path of the service requests, which means that if the data-plane temporarily loses connection to the control-plane the service traffic won’t be affected.

While doing so, the data-planes also advertise the IP address of each service. The IP address is retrieved:

• On Kubernetes by looking at the address of the Pod.
• On Universal by looking at the inbound listeners that have been configured in the inbound property of the data-plane specification.

The IP address that’s being advertised by every data-plane to the control-plane is also being used to route service traffic from one kuma-dp to another kuma-dp. This means that Kuma knows at any given time what are all the IP addresses associated to every replica of every service. Another use-case where the IP address of the data-planes is being used is for metrics scraping by Prometheus.

Because Kuma by design already knows the address to every data-plane - and therefore to every service in the mesh - it is not required to use Kuma with a third-party service discovery tool or dns resolver, because such tools would not give Kuma any additional information than the one it already knows.

In order for connectivity to work among the kuma-dp instances, Kuma also assumes a flat network topology: this means that every data-plane must be able to consume another data-plane by directly sending requests to its IP address. This is true also in the case of multi-region or multi-datacenter setups.

As illustrated in the picture above, every kuma-dp must be able to send requests to every other kuma-dp on the specific ports that govern service traffic, as described in the kuma-dp ports section.