Kuma vs linkerd

Overview

linkerd

Stacks132

Followers312

Votes7

Kuma

Stacks16

Followers95

Votes0

GitHub Stars2.3K

Forks169

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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Advice on linkerd, Kuma

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.

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Detailed Comparison

linkerd	Kuma
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.	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.
Adaptive load-balancing;Fine-grained instrumentation;Abstractions over service discovery;Runtime traffic routing;Tech that's built for scale	Universal Control Plane; Lightweight Data Plane; Automatic; Multi-Tenancy; Network Security; Traffic Segmentation: With flexible ACL rules
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 2.3K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 169
Stacks 132	Stacks 16
Followers 312	Followers 95
Votes 7	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 3 CNCF Project 1 Service Mesh 1 Light Weight 1 Pre-check permissions 1 Fast Integration	No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available	YAML CentOS Kubernetes PostgreSQL Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) macOS Debian Ubuntu

What are some alternatives to linkerd, Kuma?

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 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

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

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

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

Dapr

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.

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.

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

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 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

Related Comparisons

Kuma vs linkerd: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Kuma and Linkerd

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Kuma vs linkerd

Overview

Kuma vs linkerd: What are the differences?