The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has well over 120 projects in its fold, yet a grand total of 16 were the only ones to graduate through 2021. Service mesh framework Linkerd received its cap and gown last year.

Linkerd was the first service mesh project to achieve graduated status. Much of its success can be attributed to significant adoption in the enterprise community, with Microsoft, Nordstrom and Expedia among the more noteworthy users.

“The bar is so high, and it’s not like the project is technically good or bad, but it’s really a measure of maturity of the community around it,” said William Morgan (pictured), chief executive officer of Buoyant Inc., Linkerd’s creator. “Is it being adopted by organizations that are really relying on it in a critical way? We see Linkerd adoption across industries, across verticals, and we see it from very small companies to very large ones.”

Morgan spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Keith Townsend and Enrico Sogonretti at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Buoyant’s focus on simplifying the service mesh and upcoming new features for Linkerd’s enhanced security. (* Disclosure below.)

Focus on simplicity and security

Buoyant is seeking to commercialize the Linkerd service mesh platform, having launched the public beta of its Buoyant Cloud offering in June, which is aimed at making it easy to deploy Linkerd. Simplicity has always been a key objective of the open-source project, according to Morgan.

“Every aspect of Linkerd is designed to be as operationally simple as possible,” he said. “When we deliver features, that’s always our primary consideration. The service mesh space is notorious for complexity, and a lot of what we’ve been doing on the Linkerd side is trying to reverse that idea.”

There are a number of new features in the pipeline for Linkerd as the service mesh technology continues to add users. In May, Buoyant announced a managed service for Linkerd. There are also plans for additional security functionality.

“There’s a clear roadmap ahead continuing down the security realm,” Morgan said. “Coming up in the 2.12 release, we’ll have route-based policy, as well, so you can say, ‘This service is only allowed to call these three routes on this endpoint.’”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event. Neither the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the sponsor of this segment, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE