New update provides critical cross-cluster, zero-touch application failover for Kubernetes environments

SAN FRANCISCO, March 9, 2022 — Buoyant, creator of the widely-used open source Linkerd service mesh and of the Buoyant Cloud managed Linkerd service, today announced the release of the new automated failover functionality for multi-cluster Kubernetes deployments.

This new feature, introduced as a Kubernetes operator in recent Linkerd releases, automatically redirects application traffic to alternate Kubernetes clusters in the event of failures or outages in the original cluster. This capability allows applications built on Kubernetes to maintain system availability to customers even in the event of application outages, a critical part of disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) scenarios.

“Running multiple clusters across regions, zones, or clouds, is a necessary part of any highly available application architecture. Unfortunately, Kubernetes itself provides very little in the way of help,” said William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant and one of the original creators of Linkerd. “Linkerd solves critical and immediate problems for Kubernetes adopters, not just by providing secure cross-cluster communication that’s fully transparent to the application, but now, with the new failover operator, by providing fully automated recovery mechanisms that trigger in the event of application and cluster failures.”

Building on the existing reliability, observability, and security features of the service mesh, Linkerd’s new failover capabilities provide a flexible framework with which Kubernetes adopters can address a variety of situations. For service- and cluster-related failures, IT teams have the ability to automatically reroute traffic to a replica of a service in another cluster, reroute cross-cluster traffic to a different cluster, automate the service failover within a single cluster, and more.

This news comes on the heels of the release of Linkerd 2.11, which introduced network policy features, and the addition of network policy management to Buoyant Cloud. The network policy features are designed to address a critical need for security-conscious organizations and enable users to easily enforce security rules around the types of network traffic allowed within a Kubernetes cluster. As a result of its focus on security, simplicity and performance, Linkerd adoption has skyrocketed 118% in the last year according to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Annual Survey 2021.

Linkerd is the only graduated service mesh of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. For more information on how to get started with Linkerd, visit linkerd.io.

About Buoyant

Buoyant was founded by William Morgan and Oliver Gould in 2015 with the mission of making the fundamental tools for reliability and security of software accessible to every engineer in the world. They pioneered the service mesh category with Linkerd, the open source, open governance service mesh. Today, Buoyant’s software powers critical production infrastructure for leading organizations around the world. Buoyant investors include Google Ventures, Benchmark, #ANGELS, A Capital and SV Angel. For more information, visit buoyant.io.

About Linkerd

Linkerd is an open source, ultralight, ultra-simple service mesh for Kubernetes. Created in 2016, Linkerd was the first service mesh project and the one to introduce the term “service mesh” to the industry lexicon. Linkerd is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). For more information, visit linkerd.io.

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