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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