Deployments

The deployment modes that Kuma provides are quite unique in the Service Mesh landscape and have been developed thanks to the guidance of our enterprise users, especially when it comes to the distributed one.

There are two deployment models that can be adopted with Kuma in order to address any Service Mesh use-case, from the simple one running in one zone to the more complex one where multiple Kubernetes or VM zones are involved, or even hybrid universal ones where Kuma runs simultaneously on Kubernetes and VMs.

The two deployments modes are:

• Standalone: Kuma’s default deployment model with one control plane (that can be scaled horizontally) and many data planes connecting directly to it.
• Multi-Zone: Kuma’s advanced deployment model to support multiple Kubernetes or VM-based zones, or hybrid Service Meshes running on both Kubernetes and VMs combined.

Automatic Connectivity: Running a Service Mesh should be easy and connectivity should be abstracted away, so that when a service wants to consume another service all it needs is the name of the destination service. Kuma achieves this out of the box in both deployment modes with a built-in service discovery and - in the case of the multi-zone mode - with an Ingress resource and Remote CPs.