Data plane proxy

A data plane proxy (DPP) is the part of Kuma that runs next to each workload that is a member of the mesh. A DPP is composed of the following components:

• a Dataplane entity defines the configuration of the DPP
• a kuma-dp binary runs on each instance that is part of the mesh. This binary spawns the following subprocesses:
  • Envoy receives configuration from the control-plane to manage traffic correctly
  • core-dns resolves Kuma specific DNS entries

We have one instance of kuma-dp for every instance of every service.

Concepts

Inbound

An inbound consists of:

• a set of tags
• the port the workload listens on

Most of the time a DPP exposes a single inbound. When a workload exposes multiple ports, multiple inbounds can be defined.

Tags

Tags are a set of key-value pairs (.e.g version=v2) that are defined for each DPP inbound. These tags serve the following purposes:

• specifying the service this DPP inbound is part of
• adding metadata about the exposed service
• allowing subsets of DPPs to be selected by these tags

Tags prefixed with kuma.io are reserved:

• kuma.io/service identifies the service name. On Kubernetes this tag is automatically created, while on Universal it must be specified manually. This tag must always be present.
• kuma.io/zone identifies the zone name in a multi-zone deployment. This tag is automatically created and cannot be overwritten.
• kuma.io/protocol identifies the protocol of the service exposed by this inbound. Accepted values are tcp, http, http2, grpc and kafka.

Service

A service is a group of all DPP inbounds that have the same kuma.io/service tag.

Outbounds

An outbound allows the workload to consume a service in the mesh using a local port. This is only useful when not using transparent-proxy.

Dataplane entity

The Dataplane entity consists of:

• the IP address used by other DPPs to connect to this DPP
• inbounds
• outbounds

A Dataplane entity must be present for each DPP. Dataplane entities are managed differently depending on the environment:

• Kubernetes: The control plane automatically generates the Dataplane entity.
• Universal: The user defines the Dataplane entity.

For more details check the dataplane specification:

Dynamic configuration of the data plane proxy

When the DPP runs:

• The kuma-dp retrieves Envoy startup configuration from the control plane.
• The kuma-dp process starts Envoy with this configuration.
• Envoy connects to the control plane using XDS and receives configuration updates when the state of the mesh changes.

The control plane uses policies and Dataplane entities to generate the DPP configuration.