During the early days of finding product-market fit, clouds were small. Often, we start with an EC2 instance here, a managed service there, then some Docker containers, microservices, and wait, Kubernetes! As clouds grow with the teams that maintain them, stable relics and legacy systems remain in production. The effort first goes towards building the future and satisfying clients — they’re paying!

At FinTech Studios, we are reconciling with these old burdens. As we continue to embrace our Kubernetes overlords, we must connect and secure the past and present without sacrificing the future, such as on-prem deployments, hybrid clouds, and traffic tracing and permissioning. Kuma, the now CNCF Sandbox service mesh born at Kong, allows us to make these gaps observable, use automated deployment practices like CD and Helm, and most importantly, integrate at our own pace.

As Kuma users, we will dive into deployment patterns with Kuma via Helm; some of its features like sidecar proxies, mTLS, mixed K8s and VM deployments; service observability; and the community support that makes it all possible. Kuma provides an easy on-ramp Day 1 while planning for Day 2, bringing business value at each step.