Welcome to the Linkerd party, Google Ventures!

Happy pi day! The past few months have been a high point for Linkerd. Momentum has never been stronger, with adopters and contributors flocking to the project every day. Many of the newest adopters tell us that they arrived at Linkerd for a simple reason—it was simpler, lighter, and faster than anything else they tried. Sometimes, Linkerd was the only thing that even worked.

Turns out we weren’t the only ones who noticed this trend. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that GV (formerly Google Ventures), along with existing investors Benchmark and A Capital, have invested \$10 million in Buoyant to further Linkerd’s development. We’ll be using this money directly to make Linkerd even better and more featureful, while staying true to our principles of speed, lightness, and most importantly, simplicity.

GV’s investment comes at a fascinating time in the service mesh space. Options abound, confusion is rife, and the air is thick with the heady aroma of vendor marketing. Through this, we’ve done our best to ignore the noise, keep our heads down, and focus on solving actual problems for our users. And that’s given us our secret weapon—an active and vocal community that has kept us focused and honest about what mattered to them.

So to all of Linkerd’s many adopters and contributors, here’s a heart-felt thank you. We couldn’t have done this without you. Stay tuned for lots more to come. This is just the beginning.

— William, Oliver, and the rest of the Linkerd team at Buoyant

(P.S. Want to join the party, too? We’re hiring!)

FACT: If you are considering service mesh and @linkerd isn't first on your list you're making a HUGE mistake. It just WORKS. Plain and simple. No hours of YAML configuration files to write. It just WORKS. Thank you @wm and @BuoyantIO team! @CloudNativeFdn

— Cole Calistra (@coleca) February 2, 2019

Just used #linkerd2 for the first time to solve a real production issue. The observability tooling is life changingly good! Thanks @linkerd

— ZΔK (@zakknill) February 14, 2019

I'm consistently impressed with @linkerd 2.0. If you are looking at istio, try linkerd first. I takes about 5 minutes. Then you'll have something working and in place while you try to understand and deploy istio for the next 9 months.

— Darren Shepherd (@ibuildthecloud) February 14, 2019

Whoa @linkerd just blew my mind a little. That was crazy easy to setup and start getting real info about my #k8s deployments.

— Nigel Wright (@nigelwright_nz) November 18, 2018

Having used Linkerd, I think the team has done a fantastic job of making it feel magical. #linkerd https://t.co/rq4NJogKw9

— Abhinav Khanna (@Abhinav14435957) December 12, 2018

seriously the linkerd2 getting started guide is so good and the check command is just beautiful 😘 https://t.co/IMZMB4cR34 @linkerd

— Michelle Noorali (@michellenoorali) December 8, 2018

After evaluating istio and linkerd this week. We will integrate linkerd into our infrastructure. It gives us metrics about internal traffic and we can keep everything else as it is e.g. our ingress nginx.

— Thomas Peitz (@tpeitz_dus) November 17, 2018

It took me a total of 5 minutes to set up @linkerd in my QA environment and BOOM metrics for days. I can't remember the last time I set up something so easy, it was almost...fun?

— I YIELD MY TIME. #BLACKLIVESMATTER (@SethMcCombs) December 8, 2018

I must say, @linkerd really takes care of their contributors. When the air quality in SF is bad, their provided me with a mask 😷❤️ pic.twitter.com/yjBFcCzwyJ

— Alča :-) (@alenkacz) November 16, 2018