BEL vs Open Source Linkerd

BEL is the enterprise distribution of Linkerd. It’s brought to you by the same team of engineers, designers, architects that created and maintain 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 the version of Linkerd that we run in our own production systems. It contains everything that we believe is necessary to be a truly production-worthy distribution of Linkerd.