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Overview

Welcome to Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd! BEL is a production-ready distribution of the Linkerd service mesh, brought to you by Buoyant, the creators and maintainers of Linkerd. BEL is the distribution of Linkerd that we run ourselves in our production-critical systems.

BEL is a hardened distribution of Linkerd with additional tools, features, and testing designed for sustained production use. BEL can be used by anyone, enterprise or not, to build secure, reliable, and observable Kubernetes platforms.

See BEL vs open source Linkerd for more. about how BEL compares to open source Linkerd.

Installing BEL

Anyone can download BEL and install it on a Kubernetes cluster. To get started, see the BEL installation guide. If you’re running Linkerd 2.15 or earlier, it’s also easy to upgrade to BEL 2.16.

The latest version is BEL enterprise-2.16.1. This is a stable release. See the full release notes for details.

BEL is free to use in non-production environments. BEL is also free to use in production at companies with fewer than 50 employees. Companies with 50 or more employees must purchase a license to run BEL in production. See the Plans and Pricing page for specifics.

Features

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

  • Lifecycle automation, including fully automated installs, upgrades, rollbacks, of both control plane and data plane. BEL will eliminate the toil not just of keeping your Linkerd control plane up to date, but also every proxy across every cluster.
  • Authorization policy generation. BEL provides a suite of tools that allows you to generate functioning security / authorization policies for existing applications by observing the live traffic in a running system and generating bootstrap policies that capture that traffic.
  • High Availability Zonal Load Balancing (HAZL), an advanced load balancer that gives you all the cost-reduction capabilities of Topology-aware Routing but without sacrificing reliability.
  • Buoyant Cloud, our one-stop centralized dashboard and automated monitoring tool. Connecting your BEL-enabled clusters to Buoyant Cloud will immediately give you access to a whole suite of monitoring, alerting, and diagnostics that will ensure you’ll know about any potential issues with your Linkerd deployment long before they become problems.
  • FIPS compliance of all cryptographic modules, if enabled. For customers who need Linkerd to operate in compliance with FIPS-140-2 (and FIPS-140-3) requirements, BEL provides a build that conforms to these standards.
  • 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!

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