Buoyant Releases Version 1.0 of Linkerd as Adoption Soars Among Startups and Enterprises

Apr 25, 2017

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwired – April 25, 2017). Buoyant, the company behind the open source Linkerd service mesh, today announced the 1.0 release, highlighting its enterprise readiness and adoption by major software companies. Created by ex-Twitter engineers who helped scale the social platform to hundreds of millions of users, the open source Linkerd project brings the same techniques for reliability at scale to companies around the globe. Today, Linkerd plays a mission-critical role at some of the most innovative software companies in the world, including Credit Karma, PayPal, and Ticketmaster.

“We launched Linkerd last year with the mission to make Internet software reliable at scale,” said William Morgan, co-founder and CEO of Buoyant. “One year later, Linkerd processes hundreds of billions of production requests every month in companies around the world, with startups and enterprises alike adopting the service mesh model as they go ‘cloud native’ to take advantage of the scalability benefits of the cloud.”

Linkerd a Critical Component of Cloud Native Adoption

The rapid rise in adoption of the cloud native approach, which combines containerization and microservices with dynamic orchestrators such as Kubernetes, is driven by the quest to push software to ever-greater levels of scalability and reliability. As an official project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Linkerd has become a de facto component of the cloud native model as a service mesh, a dedicated layer for communication between microservices in a cloud-native application.

“Just as TCP/IP provides an abstraction for reliably delivering bytes between network endpoints, Linkerd’s service mesh model abstracts the reliable delivery of requests between services in a cloud native application. This means developers can focus on writing application logic, not networking code, and that operators get a uniform layer of visibility and control over cross-service communication,” said Chris Aniszczyk, COO of the CNCF.

Linkerd’s Service Mesh Delivers Mission-Critical Reliability for Leading Enterprises

Linkerd today runs in production supporting mission-critical workloads at companies such as Credit Karma, PayPal and Ticketmaster. It also ensures reliability and uptime in a wide range of industry verticals, including fintech startups such as Monzo in the United Kingdom, government agencies such as the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and long-established companies such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that has been in the publishing business for more than 180 years.

Credit Karma, a personal finance company with over 60 million members, uses Linkerd to iterate on core infrastructure without changing application code. “At Credit Karma, system reliability is paramount. At the same time, we are continually improving the product and rolling out new features. Linkerd has allowed us to decouple our application code from the underlying infrastructure platform, enabling us to rapidly iterate on both features and infrastructure without downtime,” said Armond Bigian, VP of Engineering at Credit Karma.

PayPal, the global payments leader, relies on Linkerd for reliability, visibility and encryption across their microservices. “We’re transitioning our core application from monolith to microservices. Linkerd has given us granular visibility into the state of our services, secured the communication between them, and helped ensure end-to-end reliability by intelligently balancing load and handling partial failures,” said Josh Holtzman, Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Xoom, a service of PayPal.

Ticketmaster, the global market leader in ticketing, uses Linkerd alongside Kubernetes to drive critical ticketing infrastructure that scales up to handle massive bursts in load when tickets go on sale. “Using Linkerd as a service mesh allows us to build resilient, cloud-native applications with a degree of visibility and control into runtime behavior that we’ve never had before without having to modify our software,” said Kraig Amador, Senior Director at TicketMaster.

Linkerd 1.0 Milestone Marks a Mature Feature Set for Cloud Native Reliability

The 1.0 release of Linkerd is a milestone for the project, reflecting a mature, production-tested feature set. Key features of the 1.0 release include a service mesh API; end-to-end reliability features such as load balancing, circuit breaking, request routing, deadline propagation, and retry management; security and encryption features such as transparent TLS; distributed tracing and fine-grained instrumentation; and many integrations into the cloud native ecosystem, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and gRPC.

About Buoyant

Buoyant 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 the Internet software faster, more scalable, and more reliable. Buoyant is based in San Francisco and is backed by some of Silicon Valley’s top investors, including A Capital, SV Angel, Fuel Capital, Webb Investment Network, and Data Collective.

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