Kong Mesh 1.9 and Kuma 1.8 have been released with a host of new features and improvements designed to enhance service mesh capabilities, including the introduction of observability for the built-in Gateway with features such as tracing, metrics, and an accompanying Grafana dashboard. The Cross-Mesh Gateway now supports multi-zone functionality, allowing traffic routing between zones where gateways are present, and the CNI has been rewritten to leverage a new transparent-proxy. Additionally, the Mesh Gateway supports TCP traffic and provides options for path rewrite and header modifications, while the retry policy offers greater flexibility, and metrics filtering is introduced to enhance performance. Security is bolstered with support for Projected Service Account Tokens in Kubernetes, and a complete rewrite of the TCP TrafficLog aligns with Envoy's capabilities. These updates aim to simplify multi-tenant and multi-zone use cases, improve production readiness, and offer a more feature-rich and observant gateway experience.