Overview

Welcome to Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd (BEL). BEL is the enterprise version of Linkerd. It is brought to you by Buoyant, the creators and maintainers of Linkerd.

BEL is a hardened version of Linkerd with stable releases, as well as additional tools, features, and testing designed for sustained production use.

Getting started

BEL 2.19 was first released on October 31, 2025. The latest point release is enterprise-2.19.8. To determine the current level of customer support for BEL 2.19, please refer to the BEL Support Lifetimes table.

Anyone can download BEL and install it on a Kubernetes cluster. To get started, see the BEL installation guide. If you’re running a version of Linkerd prior to enterprise-2.19.8, it’s also easy to upgrade.

While downloading and installing BEL is free, usage may require a paid plan. See the FAQ for details.

Features

In addition to the full Linkerd featureset, BEL includes some additional features designed for sustained production use. This includes:

High Availability Zonal Load Balancing (HAZL), an advanced load balancer that removes expensive cross-zone traffic without sacrificing reliability.
Lifecycle automation including automated installs, upgrades, and rollbacks of Linkerd’s control plane and data plane.
Support for Windows environments and meshed Windows workloads.
Authorization policy generation for bootstrapping security authorization policies from live traffic.
Buoyant Cloud, our one-stop centralized dashboard and automated monitoring tool.
FIPS-validated encryption of data in transit that allows customers to meet stringent FIPS 140-2 and FIPS 140-3 requirements.
Software Bills of Material which enumerate the composition of every aspect of BEL.

See the full list of features for more.

Getting help with BEL

If you get stuck on anything, please check out the places you can get help and support with BEL.

Happy meshing!