Linkerd creator Buoyant and SUSE partnered to develop an edge computing platform that provides near-immediate time to value for any enterprise with Kubernetes expertise. “It’s not a new, untested system that no one has operated before — these are mature technologies with a lot of pre-existing industry expertise,” Buoyant CEO William Morgan told SDxCentral.

SUSE and Buoyant bring complementary knowledge and technologies to the challenge of edge computing. The joint solution combines SUSE’s K3S lightweight Kubernetes distribution, which is designed especially for the edge, and Linkerd’s secure and reliable network connectivity, which is ideal for resource-constrained environments and powered by ARM64 processors.

Edge computing is still  in its “early days,” Morgan said. But both Kubernetes and Linkerd represent a “mature implementation of state-of-the-art management, security and reliability for distributed systems running cloud environments.”

By combining these parallel worlds with significant differences in maturity, SUSE and Buoyant hope to inject their individual “values, benefits and hard-won lessons learned into the fledgling but rapidly growing edge compute space,” Morgan said.

As part of the joint solution, Buoyant is expanding the Linkerd service mesh’s network backbone, or data plane, to include non-Kubernetes workloads. This represents “a massive step forward for Linkerd,” Morgan said.

Organizations with legacy workloads on virtual machines (VMs) or bare metal can “gain all the guarantees around network security, reliability and observability that Linkerd provides for Kubernetes workloads today,” he said.

Although the open source service mesh project started with Kubernetes, that was never the final destination in mind. And even at enterprises that use Kubernetes in some respect, “it’s become  common to find situations where non-Kubernetes workloads are a fact of life,” Morgan said. By expanding Linkerd’s mesh capabilities to legacy workloads, “the network between these workloads and the Kubernetes clusters can finally take advantage of the modern, enterprise-grade networking that Linkerd provides.”

The two companies’ “collaborative work on Linkerd mesh expansion is key to achieving that goal and will help connect both the smallest and oldest systems into the modern Kubernetes-oriented world,” SUSE GM of Edge Keith Basil added.

Morgan told SDxCentral that Linkerd adoption continues to grow “without any sign of slowing,” and this expansion to edge computing and non-Kubernetes workloads has created “a dramatic expansion in scope for the project.”

“I am confident we'll see a new set of interesting customers and adopters who want to take advantage of Linkerd's ability to bring networking into the modern world,” Morgan added.