.svg){kind=small}
Case Studies
Mezmo is a fast-growing observability company that makes observability data consumable and actionable to customers around the world, from hyper-growth startups and Fortune 500 companies. To provide this critical service to its customers, Mezmo processes a tremendous amount of data—petabytes every month—across a highly scaled, multi-region and multi-cloud Kubernetes platform.
To satisfy critical customer requirements around data security, Mezmo investigated several service mesh options. After a significant evaluation, Mezmo chose Linkerd for its simplicity and ease of use. Today, Mezmo operates Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd at significant scale in production, taking advantage of Linkerd features such as automatic encryption of data in transit and authentication of workload identities through mutual TLS to provide best-in-class security to its customers' valuable data at scale.
Founded in 2015 in Silicon Valley, Mezmo (formerly known as LogDNA) provides a powerful telemetry data platform for its customers that handles extreme amounts of data. Mezmo processes petabytes of logs and metrics data each month and has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in the US by Inc 5000 and Deloitte Fast 500.
The Mezmo Telemetry Pipeline allows customers to set up sophisticated rules for ingesting, profiling, transforming, and routing all data across the company, allowing, for example, optimized security data such as audit logs and login attempts to be delivered to a SEIM, while routing compliant marketing data such as web access logs and form errors to the marketing team. In addition, integrated log analysis helps enterprises to search, visualize and act on telemetry data easily. With this platform, Mezmo customers get the unique capability to respond quickly to any incident or data change by correlating these different streams. Mezmo's powerful toolset allows customers to manage their complete log and telemetry data across their entire platform.
To handle the extreme scale of data it processes, Mezmo's platform itself is highly scaled: it comprises 10+ Kubernetes clusters across 10+ regions and runs in both AWS and IBM Cloud. Like all fast-moving companies, this platform operates in service of teams of product owners and developers, who are continuously pushing the limit of what's possible. "Constant product innovation is business critical because this is a fast moving space" stated Rich Prillinger, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Mezmo, "and the platform we build must support that rapid pace of innovation."
In 2022, one of Mezmo's largest customers presented a new requirement. This customer's data included sensitive information such as PII, health records, credit card numbers, and more, and they needed encryption of this data in transit as well as authentication of workload identities handling this data in order to protect it.
The Mezmo team knew that mutual TLS provided exactly these features and that a service mesh was the best way to tackle this requirement in Kubernetes, and began an internal evaluation process for the best implementation. The team started by evaluating Kuma and Istio. However, after 6+ months, with an engineer assigned full-time to the task, the team could not bring either project to the level of confidence the platform demanded.
The Mezmo platform team then moved on to Linkerd and, within a few days, had the project working and providing mutual TLS for network communication on the clusters. Their service mesh decision was clear: after months of unsuccessfully trying to get other service meshes to work, Linkerd's ability to "just work" convinced Mezmo platform engineers they had found their solution.
After a long period of research and experimentation with service meshes, it was a tremendous relief to finally have a clear path with Linkerd to meet our customer's demands — Rich Prillinger, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Mezmo.
Mezmo's rollout of Linkerd took a "fixing the airplane while it's flying" approach—it was critical that application uptime and reliability was not impacted during the rollout. Prillinger’s team took an incremental approach, starting by implementing the mesh on less critical services, then rolling the mesh out across the sites from smallest to largest, and finally repeating this process across all the services. This was only made possible by Linkerd's ability to be deployed incrementally on individual components without disrupting the existing communication with un-meshed components.
Today, Mezmo's platform is meshed with Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd. And while mTLS was the primary driver for adopting a service mesh, other Linkerd features such as latency-based load balancing, authorization policy, and mutual TLS have become icing on the cake, further allowing Mezmo to provide a highly available platform with world-class security. With Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd, Mezmo takes advantage of not just Linkerd's powerful feature set but also the stable releases, semantic version guarantees, and CVE remediation SLAs of Buoyant's enterprise Linkerd distribution.
The successful deployment of Linkerd was directly linked to revenue preservation at Mezmo. Meeting the critical mTLS requirement from a high-profile customer meant an end to countless hours looking for the right solution and numerous, sometimes tense, customer meetings—a huge relief for the entire team.
Adopting Linkerd not only helped Mezmo meet their customer's demands, it also made their platform more secure, benefiting all Mezmo users. The Buoyant Cloud dashboard has become a critical part of the platform team's ability to understand their infrastructure. Finally, Buoyant's Linkerd support team has also been a part of Mezmo's success.
I spend a lot of time dealing with vendors, and dealing with Buoyant has been excellent. We've had great, responsive support. We also have a direct line of communication with competent engineers able to help us — Rich Prillinger, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Mezmo.
Want to give Linkerd a try? You can download and run the production-ready Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd in minutes. Get started today!
.svg)