Interview Available

The Service Mesh: It's About Traffic

Tell me a bit about you, Buoyant and Linkerd.

Before Buoyant I worked with large Internet companies, Yahoo and Twitter, and Twitter is where I learned the most about what we're doing at Buoyant and with Linkerd. Twitter is working on a framework called Finagle. We're building on a microservice architecture. At Twitter we didn't have those terms or the awareness that that's what we're doing. We called it SOA, but we were starting to build that architecture and Finagle was the first service mesh in our minds where there was a control plan functionality that we operated with ZooKeeper and various other components, and then a very smart data plane could leverage that for application owners.

Tell me about the use cases that you're going to be talking about. Getting to Kubernetes. Is that what's going to be here?

One, I want to talk about the lessons from Linkerd 1 that we applied to Linkerd 2, that complexity in getting started, focusing on the value proposition that we think needs to be there. That is about Linkerd 2 of course, but service mesh shouldn't be another layer of complexity that you have to go out on your system afterwards. It has to make your Kubernetes experience better and easier to debug and easier to use. I want to focus on our philosophy of providing value out of the box without configuration, without having a whole bunch of knobs that you have to go learn.