Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd vs Kuma

Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd (BEL) is Buoyant’s enterprise distribution of Linkerd, a service mesh for Kubernetes. It encrypts meshed traffic with mutual TLS and offers latency-based load balancing, timeouts, retries, circuit breaking, gRPC load balancing and blue-green or canary deployments. It supports communication across clusters, federated services and automatic cross-cluster failover. Observability includes layer 7 success-rate and latency metrics, Prometheus-compatible metric exports and OpenTelemetry tracing. High Availability Zone-aware Load Balancing keeps requests in-zone under normal load and sends them to other zones when local endpoints are overloaded or return errors. Supported environments include Kubernetes and managed or self-hosted distributions such as Amazon EKS, Google GKE, Microsoft Azure AKS, Oracle OKE, Rancher RKE2 and Red Hat OpenShift. Linux VM workloads are supported in Premium and Strategic; the product also describes management of non-Kubernetes workloads including Windows VMs. It is free to try, and companies with fewer than 50 employees can use it in production at any scale. Premium and Strategic pricing is available by request.

Kuma is an open-source control plane for managing service meshes and microservices across Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare-metal environments. It supports single-zone or multi-zone deployments across clouds, regions, and Kubernetes clusters, and one control plane can serve multiple meshes. Its traffic policies cover HTTP and TCP routing, health checks, circuit breaking, retries, timeouts, fault injection, and rate limiting. Security features include mutual TLS and mesh traffic permissions. Observability includes service maps, traces, access logs, metrics, and OpenTelemetry, with documented integrations for Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, and Datadog. Interfaces include Kubernetes CRDs, a GUI, a REST API, and a CLI; Envoy is bundled as the data-plane proxy. Kuma is self-hosted and available under a free open-source plan. Its installation guide provides Linux and macOS downloads, and documents macOS CLI installation through Homebrew. The Kubernetes quickstart describes the GUI as read-only. Production guidance covers secrets management, API access and authentication, proxy membership, certificates, and Kubernetes RBAC.