Kuma and Prometheus for Observability in Kubernetes Microservices Clusters

A year ago, Harry Bagdi wrote an amazingly helpful blog post (link at bottom of article) on observability for microservices. And by comparing titles, it becomes obvious that my blog post draws inspiration from his work.

A year ago, Harry Bagdi wrote an amazingly helpful blog post (link at bottom of article) on observability for microservices. And by comparing titles, it becomes obvious that my blog post draws inspiration from his work.

When he published it, our company, Kong, was doing an amazing job at one thing: API gateways. So naturally, the blog post only featured leveraging the Prometheus monitoring stack in conjunction with Kong Gateway. But to quote Bob Dylan, “the times they are a-changin [and sometimes an API gateway is just not enough]”. So, we released Kuma (which was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a Sandbox project in June 2020), an open source service mesh to work in conjunction with Kong Gateway.

How does this change observability for the microservices in our Kubernetes cluster? Well, let me show you.

kubernetes microservices kuma prometheus observability service-mesh api-management grafana

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In his blog post, Marco Palladino, Kong CTO and co-founder, went over the difference between API gateways and service mesh. I highly recommend reading his blog post to see how API management and service mesh are complementary patterns for different use cases, but to summarize in his words, “an API gateway and service mesh will be used simultaneously.” We maintain two open source projects that work flawlessly together to cover all the use cases you may encounter. 

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