Open source service mesh company Buoyant Inc. is trying to take on Google LLC after landing a $10 million investment that was led by none other than Google’s venture capital arm GV.

Benchmark and A.Capital also participated in the round, which brings Buoyant’s total funding to $24 million since its founding in 2015.

Buoyant is trying to commercialize the Linkerd service mesh platform, which was created in 2016 and is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. That’s the same organization that also houses the Kubernetes container orchestration software project.

Service meshes such as Linkerd are used to connect, manage and secure microservices, which are the components of containerized applications. Containers are increasingly being used by developers to build applications that can run on any infrastructure or computing platform. Those containers are generally managed, or orchestrated, at large scale using Kubernetes.

The main idea with a service mesh is to tame the complexity of managing apps built using large numbers of microservices. Providing reliability, security and observability at the platform layer, Linkerd is used by big enterprises such as JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., BigCommerce Pty. Ltd., and HomeAway.com Inc., which operates the popular Expedia travel booking website.

Linkerd is notably a rival to Google’s Istio service mesh, which is built to run atop the Google Kubernetes Engine platform. Some might think it strange that Google would choose to invest in Buoyant, given that it’s backing a rival service offering, but Chief Executive William Morgan told SiliconANGLE it has good reason to do so.

“GV makes their investments based on who they think the long-term winner will be, regardless of whether that product competes with Google,” Morgan said.

Asked why Google believes Linkerd is likely to be the long-term winner, Morgan explained that the two offerings are quite different and are built to serve different kinds of users. In the case of Istio, it’s much more complex than Linkerd because it was designed as a value-add for Google’s cloud infrastructure. Linkerd is different, designed for enterprises to operate off their own backs.

“Linkerd is significantly simpler, faster and lighter-weight than Istio,” Morgan said. “Istio has every feature you could imagine, but it’s really complex because Google is going to operate it for you. With Linkerd, we expect you to operate it, so it has to be as simple and understandable as possible.”

And although the two service meshes target different groups of users, there might also be room for a little competition between the two. Morgan told SiliconANGLE that Buoyant’s goal now is to speed up the pace of Linkerd’s development in order to make it better able to compete with Istio.

“We’ll use the money to increase the pace of feature development, while making sure Linkerd continues to be the lightest, fastest, simplest service mesh,” Morgan said.

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