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!