Linkerd vs Tetrate Istio Subscription

Linkerd is a service mesh for Kubernetes that adds runtime debugging, observability, reliability and security without requiring changes to application code. It installs into a Kubernetes cluster and injects sidecar proxies into workload pods. The mesh handles HTTP, HTTP/2, gRPC and arbitrary TCP traffic, including TLS connections and WebSockets. It automatically enables mutual TLS between meshed applications and supports authorization policies between services. Metrics include request volume, success rates and latency distributions for HTTP, HTTP/2 and gRPC, plus TCP-level metrics. Traffic controls include load balancing, retries, timeouts, dynamic routing, traffic splitting and rate limiting. Linkerd can use Prometheus and Grafana and supports distributed tracing. Its Linkerd Viz Prometheus instance retains metrics for a short fixed interval, currently six hours, so it is intended to supplement an existing metrics store. Installation requires a modern Kubernetes cluster and a working kubectl command. The open-source project is licensed under Apache 2.0; Buoyant offers commercial support, training and architecture reviews. The listed plan is free.

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