Buoyant Introduces Buoyant Cloud: The Best Way to Run Linkerd in Mission-critical Environments

Buoyant, the creators of the world’s lightest and fastest service mesh, Linkerd, announced the public beta release of Buoyant Cloud, the best way to run Linkerd in mission-critical environments. Buoyant Cloud is a SaaS application that allows any Linkerd adopter to dramatically increase the reliability and reduce the operational cost of their service mesh deployment, through a comprehensive suite of proactive diagnostics, performance management, and on-demand support features for the service mesh. 

Linkerd’s laser focus on simplicity makes it unique in a service mesh market that is notorious for complex solutions. Buoyant Cloud extends this simplicity even further by shouldering the burden on platform engineers who are responsible for managing Linkerd deployments.

“Linkerd is a critical component of our stack, and Buoyant Cloud is a critical part of how we run Linkerd,” said Jeff Davis, VP of Engineering at Novolabs. “With Buoyant Cloud, we’re able not just to operate a mission-critical service mesh, but to build on top of it to ensure the fundamental health and security of our applications.”

This beta release of Buoyant Cloud includes a free tier that is open to all Linkerd adopters, and a core feature set that includes:

• Automatic tracking of Linkerd data plane and control plane health: Buoyant Cloud automatically and continuously assesses and validates the health of the Linkerd deployment and pinpoints potential issues ahead of time, while providing a global, cross-cluster view of Linkerd’s behavior so users can monitor and report on Linkerd best practices.
• Managing service mesh lifecycles and versions: Buoyant Cloud allows users to easily manage service mesh versions and lifecycles across pods, proxies, and clusters by identifying data plane and version incompatibilities and sanity-checking mesh installs and upgrades.
• Building a transformative service mesh platform for their business: Buoyant Cloud provides a suite of SRE-focused tools that build on top of Linkerd, including service level objectives (SLOs), workload golden metric tracking, and change tracking, allowing Kubernetes adopters to easily build a secure, reliable, and observable platform for their developers.

“While Linkerd is dramatically simpler to operate than any other service mesh, deploying any software incurs a real cost because it requires engineers to spend their time and energy operating and maintaining it,” said William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant and one of the creators of Linkerd. “Buoyant Cloud enables Linkerd adopters to spend their time and energy on their organization’s applications and infrastructure, rather than on the mechanics of operating a service mesh. And that’s just the beginning-this public beta release sets the stage for the continued rollout of an incredible set of upcoming features for Linkerd users that will further cement Linkerd’s place as the world’s lightest, simplest, and fastest service mesh.”

Buoyant will host a virtual launch event for Buoyant Cloud on July 1, 2021. All interested parties are invited to attend the one-hour event that will highlight how Buoyant Cloud makes the lives of Linkerd users much, much easier. 

The public beta of Buoyant Cloud comes at a particularly exciting time for the project. Linkerd’s focus on performance, security, and simplicity has led to a 300% increase in installs over the past year, and in recent service mesh benchmarking tests, Linkerd consumed an order of magnitude less memory and CPU and introduced up to 400% less latency than Istio. Linkerd’s adopters range from innovative startups to large international enterprises and include H-E-B, EverQuote, HP, the Nordic electronics retailer Elkjøp, and Entain, the global sports betting and gaming operator. Linkerd has also been recognized as the Best Open Source DevOps Tool of 2020 by the Tech Ascension Awards for its ability to address core challenges faced by engineers building and operating modern applications. 

For more information about getting started with Linkerd, click here, or download the latest release via GitHub.