Announcing Linkerd Enterprise, the First Enterprise-Focused Distribution of the Popular Linkerd Service Mesh Project
Summary
"Linkerd is a big part of the mission-critical security and reliability we deliver to our customers today," said Rich Prillinger, Senior Director, Platform Engineering at Mezmo. In contrast to Kubernetess native topology-aware routing, Linkerds request-balancing approach provides both high availability and cost reduction, and supports both single-cluster and cross-cluster traffic, allowing even enterprises with complex application topologies to reduce cloud spend. Linkerds unique Rust-based "micro-proxy" approach delivers not just lightning-fast performance without the security vulnerabilities of common C++ proxies, it provides a fundamentally simpler operational model without the complexity found in other service meshes such as Istio. Linkerd Enterprise further improves this simplicity with powerful lifecycle automation capabilities that allow Linkerd to be installed, upgraded (including across both control and data planes), and rolled back in a fully automated fashion, further reducing total cost of ownership and allowing devops and platform teams to focus on business priorities rather than system maintenance tasks. Linkerd Enterprise also includes FIPS-140-2 compliance; software bills-of-material (SBOMs); continually-scanned, enterprise-hardened images that are tested in customer-specific environments; SLAs around vulnerability remediations; and much more.