Looking back, it’s hard to believe that when Linkerd 0.1.0 was released two years ago, the “service mesh” category of tools was instantly born and the world suddenly changed. It’s hard to believe because that’s not quite how it happened.
Back then, our goal was simple: bring the power of Finagle—the system that had transformed Twitter from a failing monolithic app to a massive microservices architecture—to the rest of the world. The first iteration of Linkerd inherited a lot of Finagle’s view of the world, to the point where we were calling Linkerd a “RPC proxy” or a “dynamic linker for cloud-native apps.” That made a lot of sense to us at Buoyant, but less so to the rest of the world. We still had a lot to learn about what solutions actually work for real world applications, and it was a little while before the “service mesh” model really caught on.
The community that has grown around it since has been incredible. A tiny startup (at the time) called Monzo was one of our earliest adopters. They’ve continued to stay involved in the Linkerd project while growing at an amazing pace! We’re proud to have played a small part in their journey and many others. Most importantly, the community around Linkerd has grown to include an impressive cast of contributors and adopters from around the world as a result.
Fast forward two years and Linkerd is now powering the production architecture of massive companies with household names like Salesforce, PayPal, and Expedia. At Buoyant, we’ve been able to build a growing company around Linkerd that is singularly focused on service mesh technology and building products that help make the next generation of applications safe and reliable for everyone. (If you love what we’re doing at Buoyant, check out our careers page because we’re hiring!) This project may have started within the walls of Buoyant, but the success of Linkerd is something we simply can’t achieve without the support of the vibrant community it’s created.
For the past two years, you’ve used Linkerd in anger and helped us develop solutions to the very real problems you were having. Together, we’ve seen Linkerd grow to serve over a trillion service requests. That’s huge! That type of adoption was the first step necessary to helping Linkerd become less of a Buoyant-specific open source development effort, towards a more genuinely community-driven project. Contributing Linkerd to the CNCF last year was another step in that direction. Now with Linkerd’s second birthday, we’re taking yet another.
Today we’re happy to announce that two of our most prolific and helpful community contributors–Borys Pierov (NCBI) and Zack Angelo (BigCommerce)–are now also project maintainers for Linkerd. Zack and Borys have been an integral part of our community and we’re proud that they’ve chosen to double down on their awesomeness and involvement by sharing the responsibility for shaping and guiding the Linkerd project as a whole. Thank you!
We’re excited to cross this milestone in broadening what it means to be a part of the Linkerd community. There’s a lot more to come. Keep a look out for Linkerd 1.3.6 (which is just around the corner!). We look forward to continuing to work with you all as we charge into our third year together.
Happy birthday, Linkerd!
