SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (Globenewswire — July 11, 2017) — Buoyant, the company
behind the popular open source Linkerd project and
creator of the new
“service mesh”
category of cloud infrastructure software, today announced the close of
$10.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Benchmark Capital, with additional participation from #Angels, a female-led investment group of current and former Twitter executives. Also joining the round were previous investors A.Capital, Data Collective, Fuel Capital, SV Angel, and the Webb Investment Network. The round brings Buoyant’s total funding to date to $14
million and adds Peter Fenton to the Buoyant board of directors, just weeks
after stepping down from the Twitter board.
“As the entire software industry moves to cloud computing, the way that
applications are built and operated is changing dramatically,” said Peter
Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark Capital and member of the board of Docker,
New Relic and Yelp. “Buoyant’s introduction of the service mesh has the
potential to be as fundamental a component of microservices and cloud native
software as TCP/IP was to network programming, and Linkerd’s dramatic open
source adoption over the past year is evidence of just how immediate of a need
that is for companies.”
The open source Linkerd service mesh provides reliability and safety to cloud
applications by managing the communication between the “services” in an
application. In applications designed for the cloud, this internal
service-to-service communication forms a critical part of runtime behavior, but
is often hidden and unmanaged, leading to unpredictable and potentially
catastrophic cascading failures. By managing runtime communication and
decoupling it from the application, Linkerd not only increases end-to-end system
reliability, it allows companies to migrate their application between
infrastructure implementations, data centers, and cloud providers, dramatically
reducing risk of adoption and of provider lock-in.
“A service mesh like Linkerd can be one of the easiest ways for organizations to
incrementally introduce something like Kubernetes into their existing tech
stack,” said Joe Beda, Kubernetes co-creator and co-founder of Heptio. “By
abstracting service identity and discovery, Linkerd decouples application code
from the infrastructure it runs on, allowing companies to migrate business logic
from legacy systems to Kubernetes incrementally and to have a uniform layer of
visibility and control across their entire stack, regardless of the underlying
infrastructure.”
Since its launch in 2016, Linkerd has seen widespread adoption across industries
and verticals, ranging from startups like RocketLawyer, Zooz, and Monzo Bank, to
established enterprises like PayPal, Oath, and Credit Karma. Earlier this year,
Linkerd became the fifth hosted project with the Cloud Native Computing
Foundation
(CNCF),
the open source group that also hosts the Kubernetes container orchestration
project. This May, the service mesh category received further validation with
the launch of
Istio,
a service mesh collaboration between Google, IBM and Lyft. Buoyant’s recent
announcement of Linkerd and Istio integration ties these projects together,
allowing Linkerd and Istio to be used together as a unified service mesh.
“The service mesh is essential to making cloud native software operationally
viable,” said William Morgan, Linkerd co-creator and CEO of Buoyant. “It brings
one of the most critical part of your cloud application’s behavior—the runtime
communication between services—out of the realm of the invisible, implied
infrastructure, and into the role of a first-class member of the ecosystem,
where it can be monitored, managed and controlled. ”
Linkerd’s user base, which currently numbers in the thousands of engineers and
billions of production requests per day, is comprised of DevOps practitioners,
Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), platform engineers, and anyone responsible
for reliability of web-scale operations across distributed systems.
About Buoyant
Buoyant (buoyant.io) builds open source software for
cloud-native applications. Founded in 2015 by senior Twitter infrastructure
engineers William Morgan and Oliver Gould, Buoyant’s mission is to make
cloud-native software faster, more scalable, more reliable and more secure.
Buoyant is based in San Francisco and is backed by some of Silicon Valley’s top
investors, including A.Capital, Benchmark Capital, Data Collective, Fuel
Capital, SV Angel, #Angels and Webb Investment Network