Buoyant Blog

Now that we understand what a service mesh is and why you need one, and have deployed it in our environment, we'll focus on a core day two concern: how to effectively monitor your network with the CNCF-graduated service mesh.

Any organization working in the cloud has to manage multiple, complex challenges to security and reliability, while keeping a tight rein on costs. Your brand’s reputation depends on managing these challenges with aplomb, ensuring that you handle threats and failures quickly, transparently, and efficiently.

Multi-cluster Kubernetes refers to managing multiple Kubernetes clusters, which are groups of nodes working together to orchestrate and run containerized applications. These clusters can be distributed across different data centers, regions, or cloud providers to ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and better performance.

As discussed in my introduction to Linkerd, service meshes provide important, powerful security, reliability, and observability features. And although many engineers shy away from implementing a service mesh due to its perceived complexity, there is no real reason to wait if you use Linkerd.

Over the past years, service mesh adoption has skyrocketed, but the reasons have shifted over time. While service mesh adoption was initially primarily driven by reliability and observability features, today, its ability to implement core security primitives such as mutual TLS and request-level authorization — both big components of a zero trust approach to network security — is the main driver. 

We're excited to announce the launch of our free, self-paced, hands-on Fundamentals of the Service Mesh course! This course is designed for anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of service meshes and get some practical experience deploying Linkerd on a Kubernetes cluster.

When you deploy a pod, do you know if your application is running how you want it to? Is its traffic encrypted? Is your application performing as expected? Is it constantly timing out? Constantly retrying? These are all questions you have to ask yourself when running any application in production — containerized or not.

eBPF is cool technology with a lot to offer the cloud native world. It’s been a popular choice for the CNI layer of Kubernetes clusters thanks to projects like Cilium. Service meshes like Linkerd are often deployed with CNI layers like Cilium, combining Linkerd’s powerful L7 processing with Cilium’s …

Securing data in transit and at rest is essential — developers and operators are equally aware of that. Yet, breaches within high-profile companies seem to occur almost daily. Why is that? For once, securing data is a really hard process and the question of who’s responsible for what is not always ...

One of the core goals for Linkerd is to “just work”. This includes running on any modern distribution of Kubernetes. For most Kubernetes environments, that means you don’t have to do anything special to run Linkerd. But OpenShift is a lot more than just vanilla Kubernetes, so we have to make a few

Hands-on, Engineer-focused Training from the Creators of Linkerd Today, we are very excited to announce the launch of Buoyant’s Service Mesh Academy, a hands-on training series designed to provide free education for software engineers around the world on the critical topic of the service mesh. The ...

How do you restrict network traffic between namespaces in a Kubernetes cluster? Whether you’re running a multi-tenant cluster with strict isolation guarantees or simply want to introduce a layer of control, locking down namespaces within a cluster is a common desire for Kubernetes operators. In this...

Getting the best of both worlds Today we’re going to learn about how to combine Emissary ingress (formerly known as the Ambassador API Gateway) with Linkerd to build a scalable system that combines the context-aware routing of Emissary with the observability and security of Linkerd. Emissary is a …

Hello folks and welcome! Today we’re going to talk about GitOps and how it relates to the Linkerd service mesh. GitOps is a buzzy topic, and that’s in no small part because it can have a really positive impact on teams working with Kubernetes. Teams that have established effective GitOps pipelines...

In this article we’re going to show you how to accomplish a basic Kubernetes observability task: getting “golden metrics” (or “golden signals”) from the applications running on your Kubernetes cluster. We’ll do this without changing any code or doing any configuration by installing Linkerd, an open...

Applying L4 network policies with a service mesh. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to run Linkerd and Cilium together and how to use Cilium to apply L3 and L4 network policies to a cluster running Linkerd. Linkerd is an ultralight, open source service mesh. Cilium is an open source CNI layer for...

SLOs are a lot easier with a service mesh in han. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to easily create service health SLOs on Kubernetes with Prometheus, an open source time-series database, and Linkerd, an open source ultralight service mesh. You’ll see how using a service mesh can solve one of the...

Service Level Objectives are a hot topic in the world of software reliability. SLOs are usually thought of as a way to balance risk vs. reward for a given application. Should we ship a new feature for this service, even though we might risk an outage? But for Kubernetes adopters, SLOs can provide...

As the creators of Linkerd, Buoyant has been, for several years now, in the unique position of helping organizations around the globe adopt the service mesh. From the early days before “service mesh” was even a term, to the latest multi-cluster Kubernetes-based adoption, we’ve seen Linkerd usage...

At the Camp Cloud Native virtual event on June 24, I had the opportunity to talk about how Linkerd 2.8 implements multi-cluster support simply and securely for anyone who needs services to operate reliability across pods, availability zones, or regions. Running multiple production Kubernetes...