1 year ago

Five years ago, when the hype around the https://thenewstack.io/service-mesh/ was at its greatest, https://buoyant.io/ CEO https://www.linkedin.com/in/wmorgan/, fielded a lot of questions about the company’s flagship https://buoyant.io/ open source service mesh software. These days, Morgan still gets questions, but now they are a lot more pointed, about how Linkerd would work in a specific situation.

Categorically, service mesh software is a tool for adding reliability, security, and observability features to Kubernetes environments.

In the networking realm, the service mesh software handles all additional networking needs beyond simple TCP handshake Kubernetes offers, such as retries, mitigating failing requests, sending traffic to other clusters, encryption, access management.

There are multiple service mesh packages — https://thenewstack.io/istio-applies-to-join-cncf-why-now/, https://thenewstack.io/3-consul-service-mesh-myths-busted/, https://thenewstack.io/traefik-a-dynamic-reverse-proxy-for-kubernetes-and-microservices/ and so on — but what defines LinkerD specifically is its ease-of-use, Morgan said.