Distributed Systems, Linkerd, and the Cost of Network Calls with William Morgan from Buoyant
In Kubernetes environments, concerns like retries, security, observability, and traffic control often end up scattered across application code, leading to duplicated logic, inconsistent behavior, and systems that are harder to operate and debug. The service mesh was designed to solve exactly that.In this episode, David talks with William Morgan, co-founder and CEO of Buoyant, about the origins of the service mesh and the role Linkerd plays today. Linkerd is an open source, CNCF-graduated service mesh for Kubernetes, built in Rust, that provides security, observability, and reliability. William traces the idea back to his time at Twitter, where the company’s move from a Ruby on Rails monolith to distributed services on Mesos exposed the hidden complexity of network calls and failure handling. He walks through what makes Linkerd unique: operational simplicity, built-in TLS and policy, retries, timeouts, rate limiting, and traffic splitting for safer rollouts. The two also explore open source sustainability, the difference between simple and easy, and how AI may create new platform challenges through new traffic patterns, nondeterministic code, and heightened security needs.
