As I look back at 2019 and all the amazing things we’ve achieved as a team, it was a big year for us at Kong. We’ve grown tremendously in just the past year alone, doubling to more than 160 employees, reaching 170 Kong Enterprise customers, hitting 100 million downloads of our open source Kong Gateway and running more than 1 million instances of Kong per month across the world.

Welcome to our second hands-on Kuma guide! The first one walked you through securing your application with mTLS using Kuma. Today, this guide will walk you through Kuma’s new L4 traffic routing rules. These rules will allow you to easily implement blue/green deployments and canary releases. In summary, Kuma will now alleviate the stress of deploying new versions and/or features into your service mesh. Let’s take a glimpse at how to achieve it in our sample application.

At KubeCon North America 2019, the community provided us with a ton of feedback and feature requests. We’re proud to release some of the most widely requested features in our latest version of Kuma: third-party CA (Certificate Authority) support, health checks, and a GUI! Kuma’s new health checks will help minimize the number of failed requests between your application. The third-party CA support will provide more flexibility when deciding how to secure your mesh.

As we approach the end of the year, I am reflecting on the fascinating evolution of how technology solves business problems. Since 2016, I have seen microservices drive buying decisions for many large enterprises. At the same time, open source adoption has been gaining ground from its emergence as a grassroots movement in the 90s to an industry-defining standard, driven by the rise of developers as strategic influencers.