Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd vs Network Service Mesh

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.

Network Service Mesh connects workloads across clusters and clouds through a hybrid, multi-cloud IP service mesh. Each workload can connect independently to zero or more Network Services, regardless of where it runs. The project says it works with an existing CNI without requiring changes to Kubernetes or workloads. Services can provide connectivity, security, and observability at Layer 3 and above, carrying IP or Ethernet payloads.

Clients may be Kubernetes pods, virtual machines, or physical servers. They authenticate independently, currently using SPIFFE IDs, and need authorization to attach. Clients request and close virtual wires over gRPC and can monitor connection status through a streaming call. Endpoint selection offers composition, selective composition, topology awareness, and scale from zero. A service may also provide domain-scoped DNS for connected pods. The architecture describes integration with Istio, Linkerd, Consul, and Kuma. Network Service Mesh is a CNCF sandbox project and is free and open source. Its run guide lists Docker, Go, a Kubernetes cluster, and kubectl as prerequisites; most examples require at least two worker nodes.