BEL vs Open Source Linkerd

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

Linkerd is the world’s best service mesh. We love Linkerd—we created it, after all, and we continue to maintain, build, and improve it every day. We’ve been building Linkerd for almost a decade.

But there’s a big difference between an open source project and a production-ready, supported product. That’s where BEL comes in.

BEL is our production-ready distribution of Linkerd. It’s brought to you by Buoyant, the same team of engineers, designers, architects who created Linkerd. BEL is everything in Linkerd, plus:

• Stable releases. In contrast to open source Linkerd, which is only available via edge releases. BEL is available via stable releases. See the stable vs edge releases FAQ for what this means for you.
• Hardening and testing. BEL releases go through significant additional testing and vetting, including testing in specific environments, versions, and architectures.
• Additional production features. BEL contains a set of additional features designed for sustained production use, including features like high availability zonal load balancing (HAZL).

BEL is the distribution of Linkerd that we run ourselves, and are on-call for ourselves, in our production-critical systems. It’s the distribution of Linkerd that powers Buoyant Cloud, our SaaS dashboard, monitoring, and alerting tool for Linkerd. It’s the distribution of Linkerd that we support for our customers, including 24x7 oncall and the ability to wake us up at 3 in the morning if something goes wrong.

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.