Buoyant Boosts Linkerd Service Mesh for Cloud Native App Deployment

Sean Michael

Updated · Jul 20, 2017

The open-source Linkerd service mesh is a popular project that is now part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Among the leaders and primary contributors to Linkerd is startup Buoyant which has raised $10.5 million in a Series A round of funding to help commercialize the technology.

“The service mesh is essential to making cloud native software operationally viable,” William Morgan, Linkerd co-creator and CEO of Buoyant said. “It brings one of the most critical part of your cloud application’s behavior—the runtime communication between services—out of the realm of the invisible, implied infrastructure, and into the role of a first-class member of the ecosystem, where it can be monitored, managed and controlled.”

Linkerd is a fairly new effort and was first launched in 2016, though it has already been adopted by customers in production environments. Morgan along with his co-founder Oliver Gould began building Linkerd and Buoyant in 2015 after previously working as senior Twitter infrastructure engineers.

“As the entire software industry moves to cloud computing, the way that applications are built and operated is changing dramatically,” Peter Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark Capital and member of the board of Docker, New Relic and Yelp, stated. “Buoyant’s introduction of the service mesh has the potential to be as fundamental a component of microservices and cloud native software as TCP/IP was to network programming, and Linkerd’s dramatic open source adoption over the past year is evidence of just how immediate of a need that is for companies.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

Sean Michael
Sean Michael

Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.

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