Speaker: Oliver Gould

Co-Founder & CTO @BuoyantIO

Oliver Gould is the creator of Linkerd and the CTO of Buoyant, where he leads open source development efforts. Prior to joining Buoyant, he was a staff infrastructure engineer at Twitter, where he was the technical lead of Observability, Traffic, and Configuration & Coordination teams.

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SESSION + Live Q&A

The Service Mesh: It's About Traffic

The "cloud native" ecosystem---largely centered around Kubernetes and microservice architectures---has taken the industry by storm. As teams rush into this brave new world, they quickly find that there's a need for a new set of instrumentation and tooling primitives. This can be overwhelmingly complex, and without a disciplined, incremental approach, these migrations can be doomed to fail.

In 2016, we launched the Linkerd project, a service mesh hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, to give operators control over the traffic between their microservices. Since then, dozens of organizations have adopted Linkerd as a component of their cloud native architecture; and we've learned a ton about the pitfalls and pratfalls of adopting a service mesh.

In this talk, we'll discuss:

How the service mesh feature set developed organically at early cloud native companies like Twitter
The lessons we've learned helping dozens of organizations get to production with Linkerd
How we've applied these lessons to tackle complexity with Linkerd