SAN FRANCISCO, May 4, 2022 — Buoyant, creator of the widely-used open source Linkerd service mesh, today introduced “fully managed” Linkerd functionality to Buoyant Cloud, the company’s cloud-based service mesh management tool. This new feature set allows Linkerd adopters to treat the popular service mesh as a true utility by removing the complexities of maintaining, monitoring, and operating Linkerd control plane and data plane components.

Linkerd is unique in the service mesh space for a design centered around operational simplicity first and foremost, using Rust-based “micro-proxies” to handle vast scale without introducing undue complexity to the user. The new featureset in Buoyant Cloud expands on that same mission, by automating common tasks such as upgrades, installations, rollbacks, trust anchor rotation, and more to deliver on Buoyant’s promise of “service mesh without the stress”.

“The service mesh landscape is notorious for its complexity, but this isn’t some inherent attribute of service meshes—it’s a byproduct of certain other high profile but difficult and insecure service mesh solutions. In this noxious miasma of marketing-driven design and unthinking featuritis, Linkerd is a breath of fresh air: its core values are operational simplicity, security, and performance, and its core promise to our users is an understandable and predictable system,” said William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant and co-founder of Linkerd. “Buoyant Cloud now takes this a step further by using automation to shield the user from the day-to-day complexity that is inherent in the operation of any software, but especially of software in the fast-moving Kubernetes ecosystem.”

The new feature set is currently in private beta for select Buoyant Cloud customers and will be generally available in the coming months. Linkerd adopters who are interested in joining the pilot program are encouraged to join the waitlist.

**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 a graduated project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). For more information, visit linkerd.io.

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