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What's New in Kong Mesh 1.2?

Kong Mesh optimized with open-source plugins and security advancements.

April 9, 2021, 3:38 p.m.

TL;DR

kong Mesh 1.2 is out. It takes on better shape with three significant modifications.

OPA is a newly improved CNCF product that's all about a vast purpose policy engine to implement top drawer

Key Facts

1
There has been an improved data transfer rating with the latest release, with tests yielding positive throughput performance on all four fronts.
2
The plugin control and implementation has been improved. Another plugin has been added.
3
Kong 1.2 reflects latent improvement being observed even in strict mode due to asynchronous surface updates and constant synchronous mechanisms.

Details

New security functionalities are the flagship improvements in Kong Mesh 1.2. Kong Mesh is developed on open source Kuma, a universal control plane for Envoy-based service mesh, just like Istio advanced mesh supported by IBM and Google. Kong invented this in 2019 since being donated to the CNCF.

Image courtesy: https://konghq.com/blog/kong-mesh-1-2

Kong Mesh 1.2 is very big on security, as clarified with the integration of Open Policy Agent(OPA), Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 Compliance, and authentication between global and isolated control planes.

OPA is a newly improved CNCF product that's all about a vast purpose policy engine to implement top drawer, policy-based control across a cloud-native stack, helping in separating policies and service code. Though receiving plenty of interest, OPA can still go through significant changes; it might currently be unsuitable for production use. Combined with Kong Gateway, an OPA simpatico, this could be well applicable for authentication and permission over a network composed of service meshes, clusters, VM's, gateways, and Kubernetes.

Image courtesy: https://konghq.com/blog/kong-mesh-1-2

Kong's open source community can now relish the availability of retrospectively enterprise-only plugins, evidence of Kong's commitment to the community. Kong has made the proxy cache plugin available to all users. Modifications on the request-transformer plugin include advancements only available in the commercial model, including variable interpolation and templating.

Workload environments have more demand for service mesh design patterns; this brews compliance concerns with underlying service mesh platforms. The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 complies with the Envoy-based service mesh, which has always been an uphill task. This functionality has been configured on Kubernetes, VMs, and every official distribution.

Kong recently discharged its latest API (Application Programming Interface) release client and design platform insomnia, which saw the core and Designer regards integrated into a single project. In 2020, Kong released Insomnia Designer as an independent project as the developers' capabilities weren't assured. Ever since, the team has witnessed many Core users transitioning to Designer, which is why all features have been integrated into a single project.

Designer users have it all to do, from moving their data, plugins, and settings if they intend to remain dated; unlike Core users, all the latter have to do is a system update. There is no news of additional updates for the Designer.

According to history, Kong Mesh has powered Kuma's multi-zone support into enabling distributed service mesh utilization circumstances. These distributed service meshes are clusters that abound between on-premises data center settings, cloud providers, even disintegration based on workload runtime(like Kubernetes or Virtual machines).