Linkerd introduced an enterprise version of its open-source service mesh aimed at addressing the unique needs of modern enterprise IT teams with zero-trust and FIPS 140-2 compliance, cost-aware load balancing and lifecycle automation.

Enterprise organizations have a very low appetite for risk, and they follow strict security and compliance requirements for running software based on internal rules or regulated customers' needs, Linkerd creator and Bouyant CEO William Morgan told SDxCentral. The price of software has also become "a big deal," and enterprises tend to analyze total cost of ownership based on the team of engineers that operate the software, the ability to avoid security breaches and service drops, and cloud operating costs.

Linkerd Enterprise is designed to address those complexities "head on," Morgan said, citing the offering's build pipeline, which provides software bills of materials (SBOMs) and strict service level agreements (SLAs) around CVE remediation, and "enterprise-only" TCO-reducing features like lifecycle automation and smart zone-aware load balancing. This is "a rare feat for a piece of infrastructure software," he touted.

The majority of existing users of open-source Linkerd should experience a zero-touch upgrade process when switching to Linkerd Enterprise. "You simply upgrade your service mesh deployment and can immediately take advantage of the new features and capabilities," Morgan said.

Linkerd Enterprise includes a new zone-aware load balancer targeted at reducing cloud spend in multicloud environments. Enterprises can spend millions of dollars on cross-zone traffic costs, which is alleviated by the load balancer's ability to route traffic to lower-cost regions during normal conditions and send traffic to higher-cost regions only if the system is under stress.

This request-balancing approach contrasts with Kubernetes' topology-aware routing to offer high availability and lower costs for single-cluster and cross-cluster traffic, according to the vendor.

Linkerd Enterprise's lifecycle automation allows organizations to automate the process of installing and upgrading Linkerd across control and data planes. This further reduces TCO and helps IT teams center their efforts on business priorities instead of system maintenance.

Morgan also highlighted the enterprise service mesh's network security policies, which go beyond the native security capabilities of Kubernetes. Any organization can adopt a zero-trust approach to network security, complete with default encryption of all communication, workload identity authorization and granular, per-pod security boundaries.

Plus, Linkerd Enterprise includes a new layer of management tools that help IT teams adopt and manage network security policies at scale while complementing the complexities of engineering teams.

Linkerd Enterprise also represents an alternative to less-secure service meshes like Istio, according to Morgan.

Linkerd's enterprise service mesh takes a Rust-based micro-proxy approach to avoid the security vulnerabilities and performance compromises of traditional C++ proxies. This creates a simpler operational model than other service meshes. "Istio's architecture, design and its reliance on Envoy all lead to a highly complex operational surface area, not to mention a poor security posture," he said.

Running Istio in an enterprise also tends to necessitate an entire team dedicated to the task. Linkerd Enterprise's hands-off Rust data plane and standards-based configuration, however, allows companies to "shift their engineering resource allocation off of infrastructure maintenance and onto what really matters — delivering value for their customers."