Istio vs Kuma: What are the differences?

Introduction

Istio and Kuma are both service mesh platforms that provide network observability, security, and control for microservices architectures. Although they have similar functionalities, there are key differences between the two.

1. Deployment Approach: Istio is designed as a sidecar proxy model, where a dedicated envoy proxy is deployed alongside each service to manage the network traffic. On the other hand, Kuma provides a more flexible deployment approach by offering a data plane that can be integrated as a sidecar or as a standalone proxy.

2. Supported Environments: Istio is primarily focused on containerized environments and Kubernetes orchestration. It provides pre-built integrations with popular container platforms and works smoothly in the Kubernetes ecosystem. In contrast, Kuma is more agnostic and can be deployed in any cloud environment, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers without any specific Kubernetes dependency.

3. Control Plane Architecture: Istio has a centralized control plane architecture, where it uses the Pilot component to manage and distribute configurations to the sidecar proxies. Kuma, on the other hand, adopts a decentralized control plane architecture by using a multizone replicated control plane. This allows Kuma to be more resilient and scalable in managing multiple data plane instances spread across different clusters or regions.

4. Traffic Routing: Istio provides a rich set of traffic routing rules, allowing users to configure advanced routing policies like blue/green deployments, canary releases, and more. Kuma, although still under active development, currently focuses on simple traffic routing rules and policies like round-robin load balancing and path-based routing.

5. Policy Enforcement: Istio incorporates a robust policy framework that enables fine-grained access control, quota management, and request authentication. It supports JWT, OAuth, and other common authentication mechanisms. Kuma also provides security policies for fine-grained access control and traffic permissions, but it currently does not support as many authentication mechanisms as Istio.

6. Community Support: Istio has gained a large and active community since its initial launch, making it more mature and well-documented. It benefits from its association with the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) and has a wide range of contributors and active development. Kuma, being a relatively newer project, has a smaller community compared to Istio but is rapidly growing and attracting attention due to its simplicity and flexible deployment options.

In summary, Istio and Kuma are both service mesh platforms, but they differ in their deployment approach, supported environments, control plane architecture, traffic routing capabilities, policy enforcement mechanisms, and community support.