Hi Brian,
Good point about Amalgam8, I should have mentioned them. Also maybe Netflix's Prana?
In my mind Traefik, Vulcand, etc. are largely targeted at ingress / "API gateway" use cases. Whereas linkerd, Envoy, Amalgam8, and Prana are focused explicitly on service-to-service communication. Not 100% familiar with all of those projects so I hope that's not a gross mischaracterization.
Differentiating features / advantages of linkerd:
- Focused on production-tested / used-in-anger code. Sticking close to Finagle, not writing our own load-balancing, etc. This stuff is hard to get right, tons of edge cases, etc. E.g. what happens when service discovery down? When it's up, but it's lying? Etc.
- Production users across the globe (see below), lots more on the way.
- Plugin architecture, tons of integrations, explicitly easy to drop in custom stuff.
- Routing layer (again, used in prod) that is extremely powerful and decouples routing topology from traffic-serving topology.
- Focus on modern operational affordances, e.g. retry budgets and deadlines over retry policies and timeouts.
- Lots of contributors, active community and friendly Slack!
Current real-life prod users that we know of (and can talk about--some we can't) are Monzo (UK), Quid (US), Douban (CN), CentralApp (EU), NCBI (US). Lots of other companies in various staging / QA environments that we're tracking and helping to productionize. Of course open source is a funny thing and people will occasionally drop into the Slack and say "so, I've been running linkerd in prod for a few weeks and I noticed this one thing..." so we don't have a complete picture.
Let me know if that's helpful. Happy to go into lots more detail.
Also, thanks for having me this morning, was really fun to present and you have all been super friendly and supportive!
