Linkerd hit graduation status at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), marking a significant milestone as the first service mesh to earn a diploma. It also adds much-needed stability to the service mesh space that has been dogged by considerable consternation following Google’s controversial move last year for the popular Istio service mesh project.

Linkerd was initially developed by Buoyant in 2016, and it joined the CNCF as the open source group’s fifth hosted project in 2017. It has since gone through several significant updates, including a 2.0 overhaul tied to greater Kubernetes support, and slowly built out a more diverse oversight committee and contributor base.

Buoyant CEO William Morgan explained to SDxCentral in an interview that the CNCF graduation indicates a level of maturity for the platform, “not just on the adoption side but also on the project health, the community, and commitment to an inclusive, and engaged, and open community.”

Linkerd saw early challenges of an overwhelming reliance on Buoyant for code commits, but has since garnered more than 200 contributors and a steering committee composed of its end users. 

“So you have to be a significant production end user to even be on the steering committee,” Morgan explained. “We have a public commitment to open governance and a well-defined path to maintainership so basically anyone in the world, if you have the wherewithal and time commitment and the desire to do so, you can become a Linkerd maintainer.”

Although Linkerd walked the CNCF stage, Morgan said its work is far from done. The project is working to introduce an authentication policy in its upcoming release next month, which is a new feature for the service mesh. “That's something that we wanted to get to for a long time,” Morgan said. He also hopes to make Linkerd less focused on Kubernetes alone. 

“We want to get to the point where the data plane or the proxy component can run outside of Kubernetes,” Morgan said. “We can start tackling the world of people who are not just developing Kubernetes.”

Morgan added that the endgame for Linkerd is to function seamlessly and invisibly so developers can focus on the application rather than the service mesh beneath it. “That should be the ultimate goal for infrastructure and software. It's something you rely on, but you don't spend too much of your life thinking about,” Morgan said.

Linkerd’s graduation also marks a note of success over Istio, another service mesh that was created by Google, IBM, and Lyft in 2017. Istio had been lining up to be the de facto service mesh implementation, especially for Kubernetes-based container deployments.

But then Google zagged with its decision to dock the Istio service mesh project within the newly formed Open Usage Commons (OUC) group rather than donate the project to the CNCF, as the open source community expected. The project has since somewhat stalled as vendors and organizations have worked through the licensing impact of Google’s decision. This has also led to the launch of a number of other service mesh projects.

Morgan, who has long been a vocal critic of Istio, said that the project carries the danger of not being more than “empty calories” as a result of over-complication. 

“I think there is a tendency among many infrastructure projects, including Istio, to want to do more, and to want to solve broader classes of problems,” Morgan said. “And I think that's the wrong approach for infrastructure. I think that's where you end up with things that are very complicated and have a whole lot of marketing momentum, but then there's nothing behind the scenes.” 

In contrast, Morgan said Linkerd remains focused on simplicity and user experience as staples of the project. “If there's nothing else that I want Linkerd to be remembered for, it's carrying that message of simplicity and user empathy forward in the infrastructure space,” Morgan said.