2 years ago

Category: Kubernetes, Infrastructure

The Linkerd service mesh, the first service mesh to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) back in 2017 as the foundation’s fifth project overall, has reached the graduated tier of the foundation. As a graduated project, Linkerd has met a number of requirements around stability, adoption, maturity, and governance, and joins more than a dozen other graduated projects, such as Helm, Prometheus, Envoy, and Kubernetes.

Part of the balancing act, said Morgan, is to deliver all the features of the service mesh around reliability, security, and observability, “without getting mired in all the complexity, without having to hire a team of developers or a team of engineers, service mesh experts, just to run your service mesh.”

It was a scary choice, but we did that because we felt that the future of the service mesh, and in fact the future of all cloud native technology, really has to be built in Rust,” he said.

While Morgan calls the project’s CNCF graduation “a nice moment for us to reflect and to be grateful for all the people around the world who worked so hard to get Linkerd to this point,” he says that there is a long roadmap ahead, which includes things like server and client-side policies, and “mesh expansion” to allow the Linkerd data plane to operate outside of Kubernetes.