[crb]

I like to equate the question to "If I needed a container orchestrator, I'd probably use Nomad. What would I be missing out on with Kubernetes?"

Ignore the CNCF for a second. Both are open source, so will survive regardless, but the former has a single vendor behind it, and the latter has almost all the cloud industry.

There are valid use cases for FreeBSD, but the default choice is Linux.

[otterley]

> the former has a single vendor behind it, and the latter has almost all the cloud industry

The same could be said about Apple products, but that doesn't mean people should be dissuaded from using them. Quite the opposite: being in charge of a technology means you can be 100% focused on it and be relentlessly focused on making it great for your customers.

[williamallthing]

Exactly. Linkerd is fast and simple in no small part because it doesn't have 20 competing, sharp-elbowed vendors pulling it in 21 different directions. Customer focused is everything.

[cpretzer]

I'd love to hear a compelling comparison between linkerd and istio without having to compare either with other (unrelated) categories of software.

Anyone who reads these comments should be able to get an understanding of both service meshes without having to research other software.

Are you saying that istio IS kubernetes and linkerd is not? I don't think linkerd WANTS to be kubernetes.

I love your podcast, Craig, but this "hot take" is too hot to hold

[0xEFF]

This is a good analogy. For more context in the past 5 years working with customers in the Bay Area I’ve not encountered one who mentioned linkerd let alone ran it in production.

More than half those companies ran istio in production at large scales.

[williamallthing]

Maybe you're just not talking to the right companies. There are a ton of Linkerd adopters and the list is constantly growing! https://linkerd.io/community/adopters/

[ceposta07]

I think it does come down to risk and risk mitigation. As someone who works for an “Istio vendor” we see some of the largest deployments of Istio in the world for mission critical/tier-0 workloads… and all the steps it took to get there including evaluation/POC of other vendors/mesh technologies.

Part of these decisions are based on things like “What is the rest of the industry doing?” “How vibrant/diverse is the community?” “How mature is the project _for enterprise adoption_?” “What vendors are available for enterprise support?” “Is it already available in my platform of choice?” etc.etc.

The sting of “picking the wrong container orchestrator” is still fresh in a lot of organizations.

We see Istio make it through these questions with good answers for a lot of organizations where other/alternative service mesh vendors strike out pretty quickly.

This is even before we get to the “feature comparisons” for usecases these large organizations focus on/have.

[campbel]

Interesting. IMO Istio is built to entice VPs and Linkerd is built to entice engineers.

[vbezhenar]

No need to ignore CNCF. Linkerd has had a "Graduated CNCF" rubber stamp for a 2 years.

[awestroke]

You have not given me one single reason why I would be better of with Istio