It wasn’t that long ago when deploying massive-scale projects to the cloud meant largely creating the underlying infrastructure to make the migration from scratch. This reinventing the wheel-like gargantuan task is what Twitter software engineers certainly had to do. But as they figured out how to scale the social media network from Twitter’s days as a fledging startup to handle today’s 300 million regular users today, they also, almost by accident it seems, created the basis for the first service mesh Linkerd. As William Morgan, now CEO of Buoyant,  the creator and primary sponsor of Linkerd, told Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, during a recent podcast:

“And the most amazing thing about this migration was it actually worked,” Morgan said, referring to his Twitter days. “So, it was there I think, for a company to be like, ‘okay we’re rebuilding everything from scratch for that actually to succeed.’ But somehow, we managed to succeed.”