Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve published our Linkerd Production Runbook, freely available to all.

As every SRE knows, the “runbook” for a system is where you capture all the hard-earned advice for operating the system in production. Our Linkerd Production Runbook is a distillation of everything we’ve learned from our experience helping companies around the world get Linkerd into production, and keep it there—as well as our own experience operating Linkerd, which powers the production systems behind Buoyant Cloud.

A different kind of service mesh

Why publish our runbook? As the creators of Linkerd, we’ve always said that Linkerd is a different kind of service mesh. One dramatic difference from other service meshes is that we actually want you to run Linkerd, in production, fully open source and free of charge. Our philosophy is that you should never need a commercial distribution, a commercial support relationship, or an exchange of money to effectively run Linkerd in production. (Of course, we are happy to help if you need it—we have a comprehensive Linkerd commercial support package with many happy customers—but it should never be necessary.)

This philosophy has infused everything we’ve done with Linkerd, from our original donation to the CNCF in 2017 to our public commitment to open governance to the creation of the Linkerd Steering Committee to, now, the publication of our runbook. Our hope is that any Linkerd adopter should be able to pair this runbook with the Linkerd docs and feel confident that they can run the world’s fastest, lightest, smallest service mesh in production.

Productionization can be hard

Finally, as we say in the runbook: We know that productionizing and being on-call for critical systems can be difficult, stressful, and often thankless. We’ve done our best to make Linkerd as simple as possible to operate, but successfully operating a Kubernetes platform is by no means a easy task. We hope Linkerd treats you well, and from one group of engineers to another, we wish you the best of luck.

The runbook is available at buoyant.io/linkerd-runbook.

Buoyant makes Linkerd awesome

Buoyant is the creator of Linkerd and of Buoyant Cloud, the best way to run Linkerd in mission-critical environments. Today, Buoyant helps companies around the world adopt Linkerd, and provides commercial support for Linkerd as well as training and services. If you’re interested in adopting Linkerd, don’t hesitate to reach out!