Our mission
Buoyant's mission is to create a world where people can trust the technology they rely on, by giving everyone the power to build innovative, reliable, and secure software.
Our story
Buoyant was founded by William Morgan and Oliver Gould in 2015. Buoyant pioneered the service mesh category with Linkerd, the fastest, lightest service mesh for Kubernetes. Today, Linkerd and Buoyant Cloud power critical production infrastructure for leading organizations around the world.
February 2015
Founded
February 2016
First public Linkerd release
September 2016
Linkerd coins the "service mesh" term; First Linkerd production users
January 2017
Linkerd becomes the CNCF's 5th project
April 2017
Linkerd 1.0 released
April 2018
Linkerd becomes a CNCF incubating-level project
September 2018
Linkerd 2.0 released
December 2018
Linkerd adds per-route metrics
April 2019
Linkerd adds mTLS
October 2019
Linkerd adds distributed tracing
June 2020
Linkerd adds multi-cluster support
November 2020
Linkerd adds ARM support
March 2021
Buoyant Cloud in early access
June 2021
Buoyant Cloud public beta
July 2021
Linkerd achieves CNCF graduation
Awards
Containers Trailblazers Award, 2022
Awarded to containers startups offering innovative solutions to enterprises. This recognition seeks to recognize the early stage companies who are delivering next generation application infrastructure that help containers evolve from developer laptops to full scale enterprise production success stories.
Tracxn Emerging Startups of IT Opertions, 2021
Tracxn Emerging Startups provides a handpicked selection of high growth and high potential companies, founded since 2013, that are making an impact in the new-age sectors. The shortlisting is based on a combination of multiple publicly available signals and detailed analysis of the company by our internal sector specialist teams.
Digital Innovator Award, 2021
Intellyx is an analyst firm focused on enterprise digital transformation and the vendors that support it. Its Digital Innovator Award recognizes organizations that are the most disruptive and innovative firms in their space.
Tech Ascension Award, 2021
The Tech Ascension Awards recognizes the very best innovations in B2C and B2B technology, judging applicants based on technology innovation and uniqueness, market research (analyst reports, media coverage, customer case studies), hard performance stats, and competitive differentiators.
IDC Innovators: Service Mesh, 2020
IDC Innovators are emerging vendors with revenue <$100 million that have demonstrated either a groundbreaking business model or an innovative new technology — or both. In 2020, the IDC Innovators study profiled Buoyant among other service mesh companies.
Gartner cool vendor award, 2018
Digital business transformation demands new approaches to building distributed architectures and making diverse systems work together. This report features three Cool Vendors with innovative offerings for application leaders responsible for architecture, infrastructure, and integration.
Case Studies
Our investors
Founders
William Morgan is the CEO of Buoyant. Prior to founding Buoyant, he was an infrastructure engineer at Twitter, where he ran several teams building on product-facing backend infrastructure. He has worked at Powerset, Microsoft, adap.tv, and MITRE Corp, and has been contributing to open source for over 20 years.
Oliver Gould is the CTO of Buoyant, where he leads open source development efforts. Prior to founding Buoyant, he was a staff infrastructure engineer at Twitter, and the tech lead of the Observability, Traffic, and Configuration and Coordination teams.
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