Deploy a standalone control plane

In order to deploy Kuma in a standalone deployment, the kuma-cp control plane must be started in standalone mode:

• Kubernetes
• Universal

This is the standard installation method as described in the installation page.

kumactl install control-plane | kubectl apply -f -

With zone egress:

It’s possible to run ZoneEgress for standalone deployment. In order to deploy Kuma with ZoneEgress run the install command with an additional parameter.

kumactl install control-plane --egress-enabled | kubectl apply -f -

This is the standard installation method as described in the installation page.

kuma-cp run

With zone egress:

ZoneEgress works for Universal deployment as well. In order to deploy ZoneEgress for Universal deployment follow the instruction .

Once Kuma is up and running, data plane proxies can now connect directly to it.

When the mode is not specified, Kuma will always start in standalone mode by default.

Optional: Docker authentication

Running administrative tasks (like generating a dataplane token) requires authentication by token or a connection via localhost.

Localhost authentication

For kuma-cp to recognize requests issued to docker published port it needs to run the container in the host network. To do this, add --network="host" parameter to the docker run command.

Authenticate via token

You can also configure kumactl to access kuma-dp from the container. Get the kuma-cp container id:

docker ps # copy kuma-cp container id
export KUMA_CP_CONTAINER_ID='...'

Configure kumactl:

TOKEN=$(bash -c "docker exec -it $KUMA_CP_CONTAINER_ID wget -q -O - http://localhost:5681/global-secrets/admin-user-token" | jq -r .data | base64 -d)
kumactl config control-planes add \
 --name my-control-plane \
 --address http://localhost:5681 \
 --auth-type=tokens \
 --auth-conf token=$TOKEN \
 --skip-verify

Failure modes

Control plane offline

• New data planes proxis won’t be able to join the mesh.
• Data-plane proxy configuration will not be updated.
• Communication between data planes proxies will still work.

You can think of this failure case as “Freezing” the zone mesh configuration. Communication will still work but changes will not be reflected on existing data plane proxies.