Linkerd, providing an enterprise-level open source service mesh for cloud-native applications, has moved to a 1.0 release.
Offered by cloud software provider Buoyant, the mesh adds service discovery, load balancing, failure handling, instrumentation, and routing to all interservice communication.
Bouyant describes a service mesh as a dedicated infrastructure layer for safe, fast, and reliable service-to-service communication, sitting as a layer of abstraction above TCP/IP. It's responsible for delivering requests through a complex topology of services in a cloud-native application, said William Morgan of Buoyant.
Linkerd is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Working with common protocols and service discovery back ends, including Mesos and Kubernetes, it acts as a transparent HTTP/gRPC/thrift proxy and usually can be dropped into existing applications with minimum configuration. It was built on top of the Netty client server NIO framework and the Finagle RPC framework.
The 1.0 release milestone means Linkerd now has a stable set of features that can be relied upon to handle most critical production traffic, Bouyant's Oliver Gould said. It also brings a substantial change to router configuration as well as new plugin interfaces that allow for finer-grained policy control. Linkerd was developed by former Twitter engineers and brings the same techniques for reliability at scale used in the social networking platform, Buoyant said.