Istio is feature-rich, but it may take a while to get a good grasp of its core functionalities. Linkerd is designed to keep the service mesh simple, efficient, and easy to work with. Out-of-the-box, Linkerd works with a bare minimum configuration in comparison to Istio.
Linkerd is an open source project and is backed by a startup, Buoyant (https://buoyant.io). Buoyant was started by William Morgan and Oliver Gould, both formerly from Twitter. William Morgan, as we mentioned earlier in this book, is credited with coining the phrase service mesh. He describes it as a dedicated infrastructure layer built directly into the application for an SRE. In 2016, Linkerd 1.x was the first service mesh to be created.
It has two flavors: version 1.x and 2.x. Both are very different technologies:
- Linkerd 1.x: Built on top of Netty (https://github.com/netty...
