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Kong Mesh with Kubernetes

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

To install and run Kong Mesh on Kubernetes, execute the following steps:

Finally, you can follow the Quickstart to take it from here and continue your Kong Mesh journey.

Prerequisites

You have a license for Kong Mesh.

1. Download Kong Mesh

To run Kong Mesh on Kubernetes, you need to download a compatible version of Kong Mesh for the machine from which you will be executing the commands.

Script
Manually

You can run the following script to automatically detect the operating system and download Kong Mesh:

$ curl -L https://docs.konghq.com/mesh/installer.sh | sh -

You can also download the distribution manually. Download a distribution for the client host from where you will be executing the commands to access Kubernetes:

Then, extract the archive with:

$ tar xvzf kong-mesh-1.1.2*.tar.gz

2. Run Kong Mesh

Note: Before running the Kong Mesh control plane process in the next step — which is served by the kuma-cp container — you need to have a valid Kong Mesh license in place.

Navigate to the bin folder:

$ cd kong-mesh-1.1.2/bin

Then, run the control plane with:

$ kumactl install control-plane --license-path=/path/to/license.json | kubectl apply -f -

Where /path/to/license.json is the path to a valid Kong Mesh license file on the file system.

This example will run Kong Mesh in standalone mode for a flat deployment, but there are more advanced deployment modes like multi-zone.

We suggest adding the kumactl executable to your PATH so that it’s always available in every working directory. Alternatively, you can also create a link in /usr/local/bin/ by executing:

$ ln -s ./kumactl /usr/local/bin/kumactl
Note: It may take a while for Kubernetes to start the Kong Mesh resources. You can check the status by executing: 
$ kubectl get pod -n kuma-system

3. Verify the Installation

Now that Kong Mesh (kuma-cp) has been installed in the newly created kuma-system namespace, you can access the control plane using either the GUI, kubectl, the HTTP API, or the CLI:

GUI (Read-Only)
kubectl (Read & Write)
HTTP API (Read-Only)
kumactl (Read-Only)

Kong Mesh ships with a read-only GUI that you can use to retrieve Kong Mesh resources. By default, the GUI listens on the API port 5681.

To access Kong Mesh, port-forward the API service with:

$ kubectl port-forward svc/kuma-control-plane -n kuma-system 5681:5681

Now you can navigate to 127.0.0.1:5681/gui to see the GUI.

You can use Kong Mesh with kubectl to perform read and write operations on Kong Mesh resources. For example:

$ kubectl get meshes

NAME          AGE
default       1m

Or, you can enable mTLS on the default Mesh with:

$ echo "apiVersion: kuma.io/v1alpha1
  kind: Mesh
  metadata:
    name: default
  spec:
    mtls:
      enabledBackend: ca-1
      backends:
      - name: ca-1
        type: builtin" | kubectl apply -f -

Kong Mesh ships with a read-only HTTP API that you use to retrieve Kong Mesh resources. By default, the HTTP API listens on port 5681.

To access Kong Mesh, port-forward the API service with:

$ kubectl port-forward svc/kuma-control-plane -n kuma-system 5681:5681

Now you can navigate to 127.0.0.1:5681 to see the HTTP API.

You can use the kumactl CLI to perform read-only operations on Kong Mesh resources. The kumactl binary is a client to the Kong Mesh HTTP API. To use it, first port-forward the API service with:

$ kubectl port-forward svc/kuma-control-plane -n kuma-system 5681:5681

Then run kumactl. For example:

$ kumactl get meshes

NAME          mTLS      METRICS      LOGGING   TRACING
default       off       off          off       off

You can configure kumactl to point to any remote kuma-cp instance by running:

$ kumactl config control-planes add --name=XYZ --address=http://{address-to-kong-mesh}:5681

You will notice that Kong Mesh automatically creates a Mesh entity with the name default.

4. Quickstart

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Kong Mesh.

After installation, the Kuma quickstart documentation is fully compatible with Kong Mesh, except that you are running Kong Mesh binaries instead of the vanilla Kuma ones.

To start using Kong Mesh, see the quickstart guide for Kubernetes deployments.

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