The Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is expanding its roster of hosted projects today with the inclusion of the open-source Linkerd service mesh project.

The CNCF got started in July 2015 with the Kubernetes container management platform as its first project. CNCF has since expanded by adding the Prometheus monitoring project in May 2016 and the OpenTracing project in October 2016. Finally, in November 2016, the CNCF added the Fluentd data collector.

The Linkerd project was started by Buoyant in 2015 and has its roots in the Finagle microservice library used at Twitter, Pinterest and Soundcloud.

"The service mesh is becoming a critical part of building scalable, reliable cloud-native applications," William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant and co-creator of Linkerd, said in a statement. "Our experience at Twitter showed that, in the face of unpredictable traffic, unreliable hardware, and a rapid pace of production iteration, up-time and site reliability for large microservice applications is a function of how the services that comprise that application communicate."

"Linkerd allows operators to manage that communication at scale, improving application reliability without tying it to a particular set of libraries or implementations," he added.

A Closer Look at How Linkerd Works

The way Linkerd works is by way of an abstraction layer on top of a container host instance. The Linkerd project page explains that the goal is to provide a uniform and consistent layer of instrumentation and control across services. By decoupling communication mechanics from application code, the promise that control and visibility across disparate sets of services can be enabled without the need to change application code.

"Linkerd was built based on real world developer experiences in solving problems found when building large production systems at web scale companies like Twitter and Google,” Chris Aniszczyk, COO of Cloud Native Computing Foundation, stated. "It brings these expertise to the masses, allowing a greater number of companies to benefit from microservices."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.