Buoyant, the creators of the
world's lightest and fastest service mesh,
Linkerd, announced the public
beta release of Buoyant Cloud, the best way to run Linkerd in mission-critical
environments. Buoyant Cloud is a SaaS application that allows any Linkerd
adopter to dramatically increase the reliability and reduce the operational
cost of their service mesh deployment, through a comprehensive suite of
proactive diagnostics, performance management, and on-demand support features
for the service mesh.
Linkerd's
laser focus on simplicity makes it unique in a service mesh market that is
notorious for complex solutions. Buoyant Cloud extends this simplicity even
further by shouldering the burden on platform engineers who are responsible for
managing Linkerd deployments.
"Linkerd
is a critical component of our stack, and Buoyant Cloud is a critical part of
how we run Linkerd," said Jeff Davis, VP of Engineering at Novolabs.
"With Buoyant Cloud, we're able not just to operate a mission-critical
service mesh, but to build on top of it to ensure the fundamental health and
security of our applications."
This
beta release of Buoyant Cloud includes a free tier that is open to all Linkerd
adopters, and a core feature set that includes:
- Automatic tracking of Linkerd
data plane and control plane health: Buoyant
Cloud automatically and continuously assesses and validates the health of
the Linkerd deployment and pinpoints potential issues ahead of time, while
providing a global, cross-cluster view of Linkerd's behavior so users can
monitor and report on Linkerd best practices.
- Managing service mesh lifecycles
and versions: Buoyant Cloud allows users to
easily manage service mesh versions and lifecycles across pods, proxies,
and clusters by identifying data plane and version incompatibilities and
sanity-checking mesh installs and upgrades.
- Building a transformative
service mesh platform for their business: Buoyant
Cloud provides a suite of SRE-focused tools that build on top of Linkerd,
including service level objectives (SLOs), workload golden metric
tracking, and change tracking, allowing Kubernetes adopters to easily
build a secure, reliable, and observable platform for their developers.
"While
Linkerd is dramatically simpler to operate than any other service mesh,
deploying any software incurs a real cost because it requires engineers to
spend their time and energy operating and maintaining it," said William Morgan,
CEO of Buoyant and one of the creators of Linkerd. "Buoyant Cloud enables
Linkerd adopters to spend their time and energy on their organization's
applications and infrastructure, rather than on the mechanics of operating a
service mesh. And that's just the beginning-this public beta release sets the
stage for the continued rollout of an incredible set of upcoming features for
Linkerd users that will further cement Linkerd's place as the world's lightest,
simplest, and fastest service mesh."
Buoyant
will host a virtual launch event for Buoyant Cloud on July
1, 2021. All interested parties are invited to attend the one-hour event that
will highlight how Buoyant Cloud makes the lives of Linkerd users much, much
easier.
The
public beta of Buoyant Cloud comes at a particularly exciting time for the
project. Linkerd's focus on performance, security, and simplicity has led to a
300% increase in installs over the past year, and in recent service mesh benchmarking
tests,
Linkerd consumed an order of magnitude less memory and CPU and introduced up to
400% less latency than Istio. Linkerd's adopters range from innovative
startups to large international enterprises and include H-E-B, EverQuote, HP,
the Nordic electronics
retailer Elkjøp, and Entain, the global sports
betting and gaming operator. Linkerd has also been recognized as the Best Open Source DevOps
Tool of 2020
by the Tech Ascension Awards for its ability to address core challenges faced
by engineers building and operating modern applications.
For more information about
getting started with Linkerd,
click here, or download the latest
release via
GitHub.