Buoyant Revises Release Model for the Linkerd Service Mesh
Starting in May, if you want the latest stable version of Linkerd to download and run, you will have to go with Buoyant’s commercial distribution.
Buoyant, which created and now stewards the open source service mesh, will provide downloads of its Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd (BEL), an enterprise-ready Linkerd distribution that will be free to use for individuals and businesses of up to 50 people. Businesses with over 50 employees must pay to use the service mesh software in production environments (though testing is still permitted at no cost).
BEL can be installed either by command line or through Helm charts.
Linkerd Edge releases, which come out every 10 days or so, will continue to be available on GitHub, and can also be downloaded. These are pre-finalized and released for testing new features but, like any pre-release version, may introduce breaking changes.
BEL has an additional set of proprietary tools that sit on top of Linkerd, such as a dynamic zone-aware load balancer, a Kubernetes operator for Linkerd installs and upgrades; and a set of tools for managing authorization policies.
The enterprise edition costs US$2,000 per month per cluster for production use, though there are discounts for non-profits, high-volume use cases, and other unique needs.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation manages the open source project. The copyright is held by the Linkerd authors themselves. Linkerd is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Buoyant CEO William Morgan explained in an interview with TNS that the changes in licensing are necessary to continue to ensure that Linkerd runs smoothly for enterprise users. Packaging the releases has also been demanding a lot of resources, perhaps even more than maintaining and advancing the core software itself, Morgan explained.
He likened the approach to how Red Hat operates with Linux, which offers Fedora as an early release and maintains its core Linux offering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for commercial clients.
“If you want the work that we put into the stable releases, which is predominantly around, not just testing, but also minimizing the changes in subsequent releases, that’s hard hard work” requiring input from “world-leading experts in distributed systems,” Morgan said.
“Well, that’s kind of the dark, proprietary side of things.”
The project is also taking on a number of new ambitious features to meet emerging use cases: ingress and egress traffic control, IPv6 support and other projects. When these features are near completion, they will need to work seamlessly the rest of the software itself.
The release of Linkerd 2.15, released this week, includes a number of new capabilities. One is a “mesh expansion,” which will allow users to incorporate non-Kubernetes workloads, such as those from VMs or even bare metal servers, through the use of Rust-based micro-proxies.
Building out the mesh capabilities necessitated greater machine-to-machine authentication, so Linkerd incorporated support for the SPIFFE workload identity standard, another CNCF project.
(Editor’s noted: This post has been updated with more information about the release options of Linkerd)
