BEL vs Open Source Linkerd

What’s the difference between Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd and open source Linkerd?

BEL is our production-ready distribution of Linkerd. It’s brought to you by the same team of engineers, designers, architects who created and maintains the open source project today.

BEL provides everything in open source Linkerd, plus:

• Stable release artifacts which follow semantic versioning rules, including point releases (such as 2.15.5) that contain only backported bigfixes and do not introduce breaking changes. Open source Linkerd provides edge releases.
• Copious release notes for every major and point release.
• Extensive automation. BEL provides features such as lifecycle automation, external workload automation, and security policy automation that can dramatically reduce the operational cost of running Linkerd.
• Additional hardening and testing including a text matrix of specific environments, Kubernetes versions, and architectures.
• Enterprise-only features. BEL contains a set of additional features designed for enterprise environments such as High Availability Zonal Load balancing (HAZL).

BEL is everything that we, as engineers who are committed to providing a stable, reliable, and secure platform, believe is necessary to be a truly production-worthy distribution of Linkerd—and we don’t make that statement lightly.