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Deploy Kong Mesh on Universal

This demo shows how to run Kong Mesh in Universal mode on a single machine.

To start learning how Kong Mesh works, you will run and secure a simple demo application that consists of two services:

demo-app: a web application that lets you increment a numeric counter. It listens on port 5000
redis: data store for the counter

 
---
title: service graph of the demo app
---
flowchart LR
demo-app(demo-app :5000)
redis(redis :6379)
demo-app --> redis

Prerequisites

Redis installed, not running

Install Kong Mesh

To download Kong Mesh we will use official installer, it will automatically detect the operating system (Amazon Linux, CentOS, RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu, and macOS) and download Kong Mesh:

curl -L https://docs.konghq.com/mesh/installer.sh | VERSION=2.7.9 sh -

To finish installation we need to add Kong Mesh binaries to path:

export PATH=$PATH:$(pwd)/-2.7.9/bin

Start control plane

Now we need to start control plane in background by running command:

kuma-cp run > cp-logs.txt 2>&1 &

To check if control plane started without issues you can check logs:

tail cp-logs.txt

Deploy demo application

Generate tokens for data plane proxies

On Universal we need to manually create tokens for data plane proxies. To do this need to run this commands (these tokens will be valid for 30 days):

kumactl generate dataplane-token --tag kuma.io/service=redis --valid-for=720h > /tmp/kuma-token-redis
kumactl generate dataplane-token --tag kuma.io/service=demo-app --valid-for=720h > /tmp/kuma-token-demo-app

After generating tokens we can start the data plane proxies that will be used for proxying traffic between demo-app and redis.

Start the data plane proxies

Because this is a quickstart, we don’t setup certificates for communication between the data plane proxies and the control plane. You’ll see a warning like the following in the kuma-dp logs:

2024-07-25T20:06:36.082Z INFO dataplane [WARNING] The data plane proxy cannot verify the identity of the control plane because you are not setting the "--ca-cert-file" argument or setting the KUMA_CONTROL_PLANE_CA_CERT environment variable.

This isn’t related to mTLS between services.

First we can start the data plane proxy for redis. On Universal we need to manually create Dataplane resources for data plane proxies, and run kuma-dp manually, to do this run:

KUMA_READINESS_PORT=9901 \ kuma-dp run \
  --cp-address=https://localhost:5678/ \
  --dns-enabled=false \
  --dataplane-token-file=/tmp/kuma-token-redis \
  --dataplane="
  type: Dataplane
  mesh: default
  name: redis
  networking: 
    address: 127.0.0.1
    inbound: 
      - port: 16379
        servicePort: 26379
        serviceAddress: 127.0.0.1
        tags: 
          kuma.io/service: redis
          kuma.io/protocol: tcp
    admin:
      port: 9903"

You can notice that we are manually specifying the readiness port with environment variable KUMA_READINESS_PORT, when each data plane is running on separate machines this is not required.

We need a separate terminal window, with the same binaries directory as above added to PATH. So assuming the same initial directory:

sh export PATH=$PATH:$(pwd)/-2.7.9/bin

Now we can start the data plane proxy for our demo-app, we can do this by running:

KUMA_READINESS_PORT=9904 \ kuma-dp run \
  --cp-address=https://localhost:5678/ \
  --dns-enabled=false \
  --dataplane-token-file=/tmp/kuma-token-demo-app \
  --dataplane="
  type: Dataplane
  mesh: default
  name: demo-app
  networking: 
    address: 127.0.0.1
    outbound:
      - port: 6379
        tags:
          kuma.io/service: redis
    inbound: 
      - port: 15000
        servicePort: 5000
        serviceAddress: 127.0.0.1
        tags: 
          kuma.io/service: demo-app
          kuma.io/protocol: http
    admin:
      port: 9906"

Run kuma-counter-demo app

We will start the kuma-counter-demo in a new terminal window:

With the data plane proxies running, we can start our apps, first we will start and configure Redis:
```
redis-server --port 26379 --daemonize yes && redis-cli -p 26379 set zone local
```
You should see message OK from Redis if this operation was successful.
Now we can start our demo-app. To do this we need to download repository with its source code:
```
git clone https://github.com/kumahq/kuma-counter-demo.git && cd kuma-counter-demo
```

Now we need to run:

npm install --prefix=app/ && npm start --prefix=app/

If demo-app was started correctly you will see message:

Server running on port 5000

In a browser, go to 127.0.0.1:5000 and increment the counter. demo-app GUI should work without issues now.

Explore Kong Mesh GUI

You can view the sidecar proxies that are connected to the Kong Mesh control plane.

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 which defaults to 5681.

To access Kong Mesh we need to navigate to 127.0.0.1:5681/gui in your browser.

To learn more, read the documentation about the user interface.

Introduction to zero-trust security

By default, the network is insecure and not encrypted. We can change this with Kong Mesh by enabling the Mutual TLS policy to provision a Certificate Authority (CA) that will automatically assign TLS certificates to our services (more specifically to the injected data plane proxies running alongside the services).

We can enable Mutual TLS with a builtin CA backend by executing:

echo 'type: Mesh
name: default
mtls:
  enabledBackend: ca-1
  backends:
    - name: ca-1
      type: builtin' | kumactl apply -f -

The traffic is now encrypted and secure. Kong Mesh does not define default traffic permissions, which means that no traffic will flow with mTLS enabled until we define a proper MeshTrafficPermission policy.

For now, the demo application won’t work. You can verify this by clicking the increment button again and seeing the error message in the browser. We can allow the traffic from the demo-app to redis by applying the following MeshTrafficPermission:

echo 'type: MeshTrafficPermission 
name: allow-from-demo-app
mesh: default 
spec: 
  targetRef: 
    kind: MeshSubset
    tags:
      kuma.io/service: redis
  from: 
    - targetRef: 
        kind: MeshSubset 
        tags:
          kuma.io/service: demo-app
      default: 
        action: Allow' | kumactl apply -f -

You can click the increment button, the application should function once again. However, the traffic to redis from any other service than demo-app is not allowed.

Next steps

Explore the Features available to govern and orchestrate your service traffic.
Learn more about what you can do with the GUI.
Explore further installation strategies for single-zone and multi-zone environments.
Read the full documentation to learn about all the capabilities of Kong Mesh.