Buoyant, the company behind the popular open source Linkerd project and creator of the new "service mesh"
category of cloud infrastructure software, today announced the close of
$10.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Benchmark
Capital, with additional participation from #Angels, a female-led
investment group of current and former Twitter executives. Also joining
the round were previous investors A.Capital, Data Collective, Fuel
Capital, SV Angel, and the Webb Investment Network. The round brings
Buoyant's total funding to date to $14 million and adds Peter Fenton to
the Buoyant board of directors, just weeks after stepping down from the
Twitter board.
"As the entire software industry moves to
cloud computing, the way that applications are built and operated is
changing dramatically," said Peter Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark
Capital and member of the board of Docker, New Relic and Yelp.
"Buoyant's introduction of the service mesh has the potential to be as
fundamental a component of microservices and cloud native software as
TCP/IP was to network programming, and Linkerd's dramatic open source
adoption over the past year is evidence of just how immediate of a need
that is for companies."
The open source Linkerd service mesh
provides reliability and safety to cloud applications by managing the
communication between the "services" in an application. In applications
designed for the cloud, this internal service-to-service communication
forms a critical part of runtime behavior, but is often hidden and
unmanaged, leading to unpredictable and potentially catastrophic
cascading failures. By managing runtime communication and decoupling it
from the application, Linkerd not only increases end-to-end system
reliability, it allows companies to migrate their application between
infrastructure implementations, data centers, and cloud providers,
dramatically reducing risk of adoption and of provider lock-in.
"A
service mesh like Linkerd can be one of the easiest ways for
organizations to incrementally introduce something like Kubernetes into
their existing tech stack," said Joe Beda, Kubernetes co-creator and
co-founder of Heptio. "By abstracting service identity and discovery,
Linkerd decouples application code from the infrastructure it runs on,
allowing companies to migrate business logic from legacy systems to
Kubernetes incrementally and to have a uniform layer of visibility and
control across their entire stack, regardless of the underlying
infrastructure."
Since its launch in 2016, Linkerd has seen
widespread adoption across industries and verticals, ranging from
startups like Rocket Lawyer, Zooz, and Monzo Bank, to established
enterprises like PayPal, Oath, and Credit Karma. Earlier this year,
Linkerd became the fifth hosted project with the Cloud Native Computing
Foundation (CNCF),
the open source group that also hosts the Kubernetes container
orchestration project. This May, the service mesh category received
further validation with the launch of Istio,
a collaboration by Google, IBM and Lyft. Buoyant's recent announcement
of Linkerd and Istio integration ties these projects together, allowing
Linkerd and Istio to be used together as a unified service mesh. For
more on our Istio integration, please read our blog here.
"The
service mesh is essential to making cloud native software operationally
viable," said William Morgan, Linkerd co-creator and CEO of Buoyant.
"It brings one of the most critical part of your cloud application's
behavior-the runtime communication between services-out of the realm of
the invisible, implied infrastructure, and into the role of a
first-class member of the ecosystem, where it can be monitored, managed
and controlled."