Service meshes have emerged as not just as something nice to have, but today, as a quintessential must-have for microservices and Kubernetes management. Given the enormous complexity of these environments, service mesh infrastructure layers offer the management and observability required for cluster visibility and tracing, among other things, that organizations often live and die by.

Among several open source options, Linkerd has emerged as a leading service mesh offering. But as William Morgan, CEO for Buoyant, which builds Linkerd, service meshes are more about solving a people problem when attempting to coordinate and management different developers’ work and collaborations.

“I was an engineer in a previous life and a lot of the service mesh conversations that we have tend to be very engineering conversations around like well, the feature set and when you're going to support x and y. And in reality, what we found is that Linkerd is very good at solving what is actually a human problem, which is, especially as the company as a company or an organization grows, you have lots of people trying to do things at the same time,” Morgan said. “What Linkerd allows you to do is make the lives of developers easier, especially developers also platform owners, by moving a lot of the functionality that they would otherwise be responsible for down to the platform layer where they don't have to worry about it.”