Kuma vs linkerd: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Kuma and Linkerd

Kuma and Linkerd are two popular service meshes that provide various features and functionalities for managing and securing microservices-based applications. Although they have similar objectives, there are several key differences between the two:

1. Architecture and Language Support: Kuma is built on top of Envoy, a high-performance L7 proxy, and supports multiple data planes, including Envoy and Nginx. On the other hand, Linkerd primarily uses its own custom-built data plane proxy, namely linkerd2-proxy. This architectural difference allows Kuma to have broader support for various data plane proxies and programming languages.

2. Traffic Routing and Load Balancing: Kuma focuses on providing advanced multi-zone deployments with mesh federation capabilities. It offers built-in support for routing and load balancing across clusters in a seamless manner. In contrast, Linkerd places more emphasis on simplicity and ease of use, providing basic routing and load balancing capabilities without extensive multi-cluster support.

3. UI and Observability: Kuma provides a rich graphical user interface (GUI) that offers real-time visibility into traffic flow, metrics, and configurations. This out-of-the-box observability feature makes it easier to monitor and troubleshoot microservices. In contrast, Linkerd offers observability through Grafana dashboards and Prometheus metrics, which require additional setup and configuration.

4. Service Discovery: Kuma leverages a built-in service discovery system, allowing services to automatically discover and communicate with each other within the mesh. It also supports external service discovery solutions, such as HashiCorp Consul. Linkerd, on the other hand, relies on Kubernetes' built-in service discovery mechanisms, like DNS-based service discovery.

5. Traffic Encryption and Security: Kuma provides automatic mTLS (mutual Transport Layer Security) encryption between services, ensuring secure communication within the mesh. It also supports transparent encryption of external services. Linkerd also supports mTLS, but it requires manual configuration and lacks native support for external service encryption.

6. Community and Adoption: Kuma is part of the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) and benefits from its vibrant open-source community. Linkerd, although also open-source, has been around for a longer time and has gained considerable traction, making it more widely adopted and mature in terms of community support and available resources.

In Summary, Kuma and Linkerd differ in terms of their architecture, traffic routing capabilities, observability features, service discovery approaches, security options, and community adoption.