During their five-year stint at Twitter Inc., William Morgan and Oliver Gould played a central role in doing away with the notorious Fail Whale that embodied the social network’s early growth pains. The duo has now raised $10.5 million from a consortium led by Benchmark Capital to help other companies overcome their own service reliability problems.

Morgan and Gould’s startup, Buoyant Inc., offers an open-source system called Linkerd (pronounced linker-dee) that aims to ease a key pain point for DevOps teams, which combine software developers with information technology operations staff: networking. It’s only becoming a more pressing challenge as companies increasingly adopt the microservice development model and deploy workloads as a set of loosely connected modules. Linking the individual components with one another takes a great deal of work once they start numbering in the dozens.

Linkerd offers a simpler alternative. Instead of directly connecting a microservice to all the different components that it needs to access, the system lets developers route requests through a centralized proxy. The Linkerd instances deployed throughout an environment form a cohesive communications layer that is easier to manage than a disjointed collection of network links.

The system provides load balancing, failover and a variety of other automation features to streamline day-to-day operations. Plus, the fact that Linkerd creates a degree of separation between microservices makes it easier to implement changes in scenarios where manual intervention is required. Developers can update and move instances around with less work than in a traditional environment since they don’t have to worry about an unaccounted connection breaking somewhere.

Linkerd’s feature set is attracting quite a bit of market interest. Since its release in 2016, the system has been adopted by PayPal Inc., Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc., Credit Karma. Inc and numerous smaller companies.

Today’s funding will go toward helping Buoyant keep widening the user base. It currently offers training, support and other professional services designed to ease the entry barrier for adopters. If other open-source startups such as Databricks Inc. are any indication, Buoyant may invest the new funds in developing a commercial edition of Linkerd to attract companies whose requirements are not fully met by the core feature set.

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