Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd

Our primary use case is providing a secure, observable, and reliable service mesh for our Kubernetes-based microservices architecture.

As a fintech company, we require a solution that handles high-traffic volumes while ensuring zero-trust network security between services without adding significant latency or operational overhead.

Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd  significantly improved our security posture by enforcing mTLS across all services with minimal operational complexity.

The ability to explicitly define and enforce which services can call each other has been extremely powerful from a compliance and zero-trust standpoint.

The most valuable features for us are automatic mTLS with a strong identity model, which is critical for a fintech environment where encrypted east-west traffic is non-negotiable.

Authorization policies are essential because the ability to explicitly define and enforce which services can call each other has been extremely powerful from a compliance and zero-trust standpoint.

Operational simplicity is another valuable feature, as Linkerd ’s lightweight design and straightforward control plane reduce cognitive and operational load compared to other meshes.

Lastly, having enterprise support and stability through a supported enterprise build with security patches and predictable releases gives us confidence in production.

I would like to see more advanced out-of-the-box dashboard visualizations through Buoyant Cloud.

I have used the solution for 3 years.

We previously used AWS App Mesh  as our service mesh.

As a fintech organization, strong mTLS and identity-based security are critical requirements for us.

While App Mesh  provided managed service mesh capabilities, we found that Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd offered a simpler operational model, better visibility into service-to-service communication, and mTLS capabilities.

We evaluated multiple service mesh solutions within the Kubernetes  ecosystem, including Istio  and other managed offerings.

We were going for FedRAMP compliance, so we needed a service mesh in our platform that is FIPS-enabled. We considered Linkerd  because it is a lightweight mesh, so we thought of using it.

Security and compliance have been enhanced with Zero Trust featuring mTLS, workload identity, and end-to-end encryption without code changes. We leverage FIPS 140-2 / 140-3 validated cryptography for regulated environments and fine-grained authorization using workload identity and HTTP/gRPC routes instead of IP-only rules. For reliability and traffic management, we ensure ultra-high availability with zone/region-aware routing, automated failover, retries, timeouts, and circuit breaking. We can also perform canary/blue-green deployments with automatic rollback. Latency-aware load balancing directs traffic to faster, healthier instances.

To manage costs and operations, we use High Availability Zonal Load Balancing (HAZL) to cut cross-zone traffic and cloud expenses, with some customers reporting significant savings. Additionally, lifecycle automation handles installation, upgrades, and day-2 operations, while mesh expansion automates the inclusion of VMs and non-Kubernetes workloads.

The most valuable features are the service mesh and the Linkerd  dashboards.

Our cluster has improved with the use of mTLS security, which is the best part of the enhancements we've realized.

I have used the solution for one year.

We started with Linkerd.

The setup cost is fine.

We also explored Istio  before switching to Linkerd.