Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd vs Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines

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.

Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines automates application delivery on Red Hat OpenShift using a cloud-native CI/CD system built on Tekton. Pipelines are defined with Kubernetes resources and standard Tekton custom resource definitions, supporting portable pipeline definitions. Runs execute with their dependencies in isolated containers and can scale on demand, a fit for decentralized teams working with microservice-based architectures. The OpenShift Developer console can create Tekton resources, show run logs and manage pipelines in namespaces. Documented image-building tools include Source-to-Image, Buildah, Buildpacks and Kaniko. Red Hat lists integrations with Tekton Pipelines, Tekton Triggers, Tekton Chains, Tekton Results and OpenShift GitOps. Pipelines as Code supports versioned, auditable workflows aligned with GitOps practices. Red Hat describes hardened security and a Trusted Supply Chain framework intended to help ensure integrity and conform with SLSA levels. The product is available with a Red Hat OpenShift subscription and included in OpenShift Container Platform. The documented CI/CD system runs on OpenShift Container Platform. Pricing is on request; the Developer Sandbox offers a 30-day trial.