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  5. Dapr vs Kuma

Dapr vs Kuma

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Kuma
Kuma
Stacks16
Followers95
Votes0
GitHub Stars2.3K
Forks169
Dapr
Dapr
Stacks96
Followers336
Votes9
GitHub Stars25.2K
Forks2.0K

Dapr vs Kuma: What are the differences?

# Introduction

Dapr and Kuma are two popular tools used in the development of cloud-native applications, but they serve different purposes and have distinct features. Below are the key differences between Dapr and Kuma.

1. **Architecture**: Dapr is a runtime that helps developers build microservices applications while Kuma is a service mesh that provides features like traffic management, observability, and security for microservices. Dapr focuses on simplifying building microservices, whereas Kuma focuses on managing and securing those services in a distributed environment.

2. **Programming Model**: Dapr provides an abstraction layer that allows developers to write their code in any language and with any framework, and then it runs on top of various platforms. Kuma, on the other hand, is language-agnostic but integrates directly with the service mesh to provide networking capabilities without changing existing code.

3. **Focus on State**: Dapr has built-in state management capabilities allowing services to easily store and retrieve state without depending on an external database. Kuma does not have native state management features but focuses more on traffic control and security aspects of service-to-service communication.

4. **Community and Ecosystem**: Dapr has a larger community and ecosystem as it is backed by Microsoft and has widespread adoption in the industry. Kuma, being a CNCF Sandbox project, is gaining traction but still has a smaller community compared to Dapr.

5. **Deployment Flexibility**: Dapr can be deployed in various environments including locally, on Kubernetes, or on other cloud platforms. Kuma is typically deployed as part of a Kubernetes cluster but can also be used in other setups, offering flexibility to users depending on their infrastructure.

6. **Usage Scope**: Dapr is more developer-centric, providing tools and libraries to simplify microservices development, whereas Kuma is more focused on operations and networking teams, offering features for managing service communication within a network.

# Summary

In summary, Dapr focuses on simplifying microservices development with a language-agnostic approach, while Kuma is a service mesh tool specializing in network management and security for microservices in distributed architectures.

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Advice on Kuma, Dapr

Mohammed
Mohammed

CTO at Famcare

Jan 16, 2020

Needs advice

One of our applications is currently migrating to AWS, and we need to make a decision between using AWS API Gateway with AWS App Mesh, or Kong API Gateway with Kuma.

Some people advise us to benefit from AWS managed services, while others raise the vendor lock issue. So, I need your advice on that, and if there is any other important factor rather than vendor locking that I must take into consideration.

38.8k views38.8k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Kuma
Kuma
Dapr
Dapr

It is a universal open source control-plane for Service Mesh and Microservices that can run and be operated natively across both Kubernetes and VM environments, in order to be easily adopted by every team in the organization.

It is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, stateless and stateful microservices that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.

Universal Control Plane; Lightweight Data Plane; Automatic; Multi-Tenancy; Network Security; Traffic Segmentation: With flexible ACL rules
Event-driven Pub-Sub system with pluggable providers and at-least-once semantics; Input and Output bindings with pluggable providers; State management with pluggable data stores; Consistent service-to-service discovery and invocation; Opt-in stateful models: Strong/Eventual consistency, First-write/Last-write wins; Cross platform Virtual Actors; Rate limiting; Built-in distributed tracing using Open Telemetry; Runs natively on Kubernetes using a dedicated Operator and CRDs; Supports all programming languages via HTTP and gRPC; Multi-Cloud, open components (bindings, pub-sub, state) from Azure, AWS, GCP; Runs anywhere - as a process or containerized; Lightweight (58MB binary, 4MB physical memory); Runs as a sidecar - removes the need for special SDKs or libraries; Dedicated CLI - developer friendly experience with easy debugging; Clients for Java, Dotnet, Go, Javascript and Python
Statistics
GitHub Stars
2.3K
GitHub Stars
25.2K
GitHub Forks
169
GitHub Forks
2.0K
Stacks
16
Stacks
96
Followers
95
Followers
336
Votes
0
Votes
9
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 3
    Manage inter-service state
  • 2
    MTLS "for free"
  • 2
    Zipkin app tracing "for free"
  • 2
    App dashboard for rapid log overview
Cons
  • 1
    Additional overhead
Integrations
YAML
YAML
CentOS
CentOS
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
macOS
macOS
Debian
Debian
Ubuntu
Ubuntu
.NET Core
.NET Core
Java
Java
Python
Python
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
JavaScript
JavaScript
Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform
Golang
Golang

What are some alternatives to Kuma, Dapr?

Istio

Istio

Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices. Service Fabric addresses the significant challenges in developing and managing cloud apps.

Moleculer

Moleculer

It is a fault tolerant framework. It has built-in load balancer, circuit breaker, retries, timeout and bulkhead features. It is open source and free of charge project.

Express Gateway

Express Gateway

A cloud-native microservices gateway completely configurable and extensible through JavaScript/Node.js built for ALL platforms and languages. Enterprise features are FREE thanks to the power of 3K+ ExpressJS battle hardened modules.

ArangoDB Foxx

ArangoDB Foxx

It is a JavaScript framework for writing data-centric HTTP microservices that run directly inside of ArangoDB.

Zuul

Zuul

It is the front door for all requests from devices and websites to the backend of the Netflix streaming application. As an edge service application, It is built to enable dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency, and security. Routing is an integral part of a microservice architecture.

linkerd

linkerd

linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing.

Jersey

Jersey

It is open source, production quality, framework for developing RESTful Web Services in Java that provides support for JAX-RS APIs and serves as a JAX-RS (JSR 311 & JSR 339) Reference Implementation. It provides it’s own API that extend the JAX-RS toolkit with additional features and utilities to further simplify RESTful service and client development.

Ocelot

Ocelot

It is aimed at people using .NET running a micro services / service oriented architecture that need a unified point of entry into their system. However it will work with anything that speaks HTTP and run on any platform that ASP.NET Core supports. It manipulates the HttpRequest object into a state specified by its configuration until it reaches a request builder middleware where it creates a HttpRequestMessage object which is used to make a request to a downstream service.

Micro

Micro

Micro is a framework for cloud native development. Micro addresses the key requirements for building cloud native services. It leverages the microservices architecture pattern and provides a set of services which act as the building blocks

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