 Hi, this is your host, Swapin Bhartya. And my next guest is, once again, William Morgan, CEO of Point. And LinkerD has finally graduated as a CNCF project. We will talk about that in a bit. But, William, let's quickly tell our viewers, what does LinkerD do? Sure. So LinkerD is a service mesh. That's a term that was very rare for a while and now seems to be everywhere, at least in the world of Kubernetes. And so what LinkerD does is it gives you a set of features primarily around observability and reliability and security. And it gives them to you at the platform level. So instead of building it in your app, you get it at the platform level and you don't have to change your application code. If you can tell me a bit about who is using LinkerD, there are other service mesh projects. What sets it apart from those projects? What distinctive advantage you have? Yeah, so we've been very fortunate to have an ever-increasing community of adopters who are running LinkerD in production, doing all sorts of interesting things. I actually gave a keynote at the last KubeCon talking about all the ways that LinkerD was being used to address the COVID-19 pandemic. So we're seeing adoption in all sorts of industries. And I think what sets LinkerD apart and the reason why we see that adoption is because as a project, we're extremely focused on one thing, which is simplicity. And that means specifically operational simplicity. So when you run a service mesh and people kind of associate service meshes with complexity and all this new stuff you have to learn, we try and make LinkerD so simple that you can install it in a couple of minutes. And then when you're running it, you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to wake up at three in the morning sweating about, is it gonna break? You understand every component. It's lightweight and it's fast and it fades into the background. And since you mentioned community, I also want to know a bit about what kind of community is there around LinkerD? This is another kind of unique aspect of LinkerD, which is that the adoption in the community around LinkerD has grown organically. It's grown through word of mouth. A lot of other service mesh projects are backed by these companies that have a trillion dollar marketing budgets. And so they can kind of like blare it out to the world and LinkerD has never really had that. So every time LinkerD grows, every time the community grows and someone new uses it, it's because they heard about it from another engineer. They heard about it from someone else who is happy with it. So it's been this very organic kind of growth in the community. What kind of use cases are there where people are, they picked LinkerD over others. If you can share some use cases, of course I don't want you to share name of companies which they would not want to, but if you can share some of the use cases, that would be great. You know, if you go on the CNCF website, you'll see a whole bunch of case studies about LinkerD and you'll see the companies that are using it. Primarily what LinkerD is useful for is when you have a system that is online, right? And that's serving these kind of immediate responses. So you have something, it's an API server or a web server where you have a customer come in or a client come in and they ask, you know, they make a request and the system has to respond very rapidly and the system has to respond all the time, you know, downtime is not acceptable. And typically these systems also process, you know, sensitive data like health data or PII, you know, or financial transactions. We see a lot of adoption in the financial kind of services industry because all of those things require something like LinkerD in order to stay secure in order to stay reliable and resilient and of course in order to stay performant. So if you look at this graduation, LinkerD has been already used in production for such a long time, you know, and that's the beauty of all these open source projects. What does this graduation mean for different stakeholders? What does it mean for community that you explained? What does it mean for these users? And what does it mean for company like Viound? Yeah, so I think, you know, for the project itself and for kind of the maintainers of the project, it doesn't really change a whole lot. I think it's a moment for us to reflect and a moment for us to be grateful and express gratitude to, you know, everyone who has helped get LinkerD to this point, but it doesn't really change anything fundamental about the project. We're still moving, you know, full speed ahead and developing all the features that we wanna do and we've got a long and exciting roadmap ahead of us. I think for the community of LinkerD adopters, it's very helpful, you know, something like this is helpful because when you bring LinkerD into your company, you're putting yourself out there, right? You're saying, hey, I think we should use this thing and if that thing is terrible, then like, you know, you're the one who gets blamed, right? And I have a lot of empathy for people who are in that situation. So I think for them to be able to say, oh, and it's a graduated project, just like Kubernetes is, just like Prometheus is, just like Envoy is, I think that brings a lot of kind of value to that conversation and they feel a little more comfortable and it's a little easier to convince people that like, yes, this actually is a good idea and we should use this. What exactly does this graduation mean? Can you talk about either the processes? Because what I hear from you is all these projects are already in production. A lot of, you know, mission critical work loads all already running all those. So what does it really mean? Yeah, I think that's a great question because the word graduation does imply that like, okay, now we're leaving, we're like going somewhere else and like nothing, you know, nothing like that is happening. LinkerD continues to be part of the CNCF, you know, and happily. So what it means kind of specifically is that the CNCF TOC, that's the Technical Oversight Committee, goes through all of the CNCF projects and they make kind of determinations about what is the maturity of this project and the determination, you know, they look at all sorts of factors. What is the community like? Is it growing? Is it, you know, kind of a self perpetuating community? Is this controlled, you know, by, you know, one source or is it like a true community project? And basically all of these things are looking at with an eye towards if you adopt one of these projects, you know, if it's a graduated project, you should feel very comfortable with that adoption. You should feel like, okay, the project's going to be around for a while, the open source community around it is going to be there for a long time. It's not just going to disappear the next day. So I think primarily when they look at a dot, when they look at for graduation, you know, they're looking at things like adoption, they're looking at things like community growth and they're looking at things like governance with an eye towards, can you trust this project? Can you feel comfortable about bringing it into your organization? How unique is Lincardy from Servicemen as you see his perspective, if you can reflect on the history because we are kind of celebrating graduation. So it does make sense to look back at past. Yeah, that's a great question. So yeah, Lincardy is really unique in this regard as well. Lincardy was very early into the CNCF. I think it was like the fifth project to ever join the CNCF and they had to create a category, like the sandbox category was created for Lincardy. This was back in 2017, you know, the Dark Ages and you know, what was very unique, I think about Lincardy was that after it joined the CNCF, suddenly, you know, there was a tremendous amount of competition, right? So some projects, you know, you go in and then like you kind of grow and like everyone's happy and everyone joins in, Lincardy instead was suddenly surrounded by all these projects that were kind of doing the same thing but came from companies with, you know, huge marketing budgets, very well funded. And so a lot of Lincardy's growth over the past couple of years has been in this highly competitive environment. And I think the reason why Lincardy has been so successful, despite the fact that like, you know, unlike most projects, it wasn't this hyper competitive environment is because we had this really consistent message about simplicity and we had this really strong sense of, I almost want to say discipline around our end users and like the experience that they were going through, right? And those two things, we actually learned some, you know, some hard lessons early on in the project and we kind of made things really, really complex. And we had to unwind that and we had to say, okay, if this is gonna work, we really need to care about our users and we need to care about what they're going through when they adopt a service mesh. I think that focuses what has allowed Lincardy to survive and to prosper and to even graduate, you know, in this extremely competitive environment. And it's hard, it's hard to build a survey. Well, it's very easy to build a service mesh. It's very hard to build a good service mesh. I think that also kind of, you know, speaks to the dynamics of the service mesh market. Can you also talk about this popularity and adoption of Lincardy? How much role does, you know, contributing it to CNCF plate because CNCF is a neutral foundation where even competitors come together and contribute on the project and then they're competing in the market. But they have the confidence in the project that, hey, you know what? Not a single vendor is going to pull the plug and leave us alone there. Yeah, so I think that's exactly right. And that was the big motivation for us donating Lincardy to the CNCF way back in 2017 was we wanted this to be a first class open source project that you could really rely on and you never had to feel like, you know, it was like a thrown over the wall or there were these hidden strings that were attached or you could use it, you know, for like toy usage. But as soon as you got to production then you had to, you know, go buy something. We never thought that was right for Lincardy. So everything we've done with Lincardy, we've made it, you know, something that it doesn't matter. You don't have to, you know, it doesn't matter who you are or how much money you have, you know, you can use Lincardy, you can take it all the way up to production and never have to, you know, worry that there's something you're missing or that you're gonna hit some stumbling block, right? And being part of the CNCF was a big signal of that as well because, you know, it's like the governance and kind of the openness of the project was directly aligned with what the CNCF cares about in their projects. William, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about Graduation, explaining what Graduation means and not only for CNCF, but also for the user community for the project itself. And I would love to have you back on the show to talk more about Lincardy and ServiceMesh. Thank you. Thanks, it's been great to be here and if you wanna try Lincardy on your own, just go to lincardy.io. It should be very easy to get started if you have a Kubernetes cluster.