Default ports

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 the kumactl CLI, by the HTTP API, or by the GUI.

The number and type of exposed ports depends on the mode in which the control plane is run

Standalone Control Plane

This is the default, single zone mode, in which all of the following ports are enabled in kuma-cp

  • TCP
    • 5443: The port for the admission webhook, only enabled in Kubernetes
    • 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.
    • 5678: the server for the control-plane to data-planes communication (bootstrap configuration, xDS to retrieve their configuration, SDS to retrieve mTLS certificates).
    • 5680: the HTTP server that returns the health status and metrics 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. It also exposes the Kuma GUI at /gui
    • 5682: HTTPS version of the services available under 5681
    • 5683: gRPC Intercommunication CP server used internally by Kuma to communicate between CP instances.

Global Control Plane

When Kuma is run as a distributed service mesh, the Global control plane exposes the following ports:

  • TCP
    • 5443: The port for the admission webhook, only enabled in Kubernetes
    • 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. Manipulating the dataplane resources is not possible. It also exposes the Kuma GUI at /gui
    • 5682: HTTPS version of the services available under 5681
    • 5683: gRPC Intercommunication CP server used internally by Kuma to communicate between CP instances.
    • 5685: the Kuma Discovery Service port, leveraged in multi-zone deployment

Zone Control Plane

When Kuma is run as a distributed service mesh, the Zone control plane exposes the following ports:

  • TCP
    • 5443: The port for the admission webhook, only enabled in Kubernetes
    • 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.
    • 5678: the server for the control-plane to data-planes communication (bootstrap configuration, xDS to retrieve their configuration, SDS to retrieve mTLS certificates).
    • 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 - you can only manage the dataplane resources.
    • 5682: HTTPS version of the services available under 5681
    • 5683: gRPC Intercommunication CP server used internally by Kuma to communicate between CP instances.

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 127.0.0.1:9901.

Check the dpp documentation for more on Envoy Admin port.