Top all-time · #2608
Buoyant Blog
Company blog · blog.buoyant.iosystemsprogramming
Buoyant Blog is the company blog at blog.buoyant.io, writing about systems and programming. Since 2016, 29 different Hacker News readers have linked it 49 times, most often “Squeezing blood from a stone: small-memory JVM tricks for microservice sidecars”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Buoyant's blog for posts on linkerd and service meshes, including load balancing beyond round-robin, JVM proxy memory use, per-request routing and tracing, and Kubernetes microservices.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd: zero-trust mTLS, FIPS for FedRAMP, gRPC load balancing, multi-cluster. CNCF-graduated, Rust-powered, production-ready.
Most-linked posts?
- Squeezing blood from a stone: small-memory JVM tricks for microservice sidecars4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-06-17
- Linkerd: Twitter-Style Operability for Microservices3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-02-18
- /2017/04/25/whats-a-service-mesh-and-why-do-i-need-one/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-04-25
- Linkerd Joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-01-26
- Making Things Faster by Adding More Steps3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-02-01
- Beyond Round Robin: Load Balancing for Latency2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-03-16
- Making microservices more resilient with circuit breaking2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-01-13
- A Service Mesh for Kubernetes, Part III: Encrypting All the Things2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-24
- Real World Microservices: When Services Stop Playing Well and Start Getting Real2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-05-04
- A Service Mesh for Kubernetes, Part II: Pods Are Great Until They’re Not2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-15
What Hacker News says?
You'll be happy to know that linkerd works really well on DC/OS as well. :) https://blog.buoyant.io/2016/10/10/linkerd-on-dcos-for-servi...
Comment linking /2016/10/10/linkerd-on-dcos-for-service-discovery-and-visibility/
on “Building a Bank with Kubernetes [slides]”Submitted Real World Microservices: When Services Stop Playing Well and Start Getting Real as a story · 193 points
HN discussionWhat kind of resource usage do you see with linkerd? It looks good, but I'm concerned about the resource overhead of a JVM based proxy on every node / pod. edit: Ok answered myself - found https://blog.buoyant.io/2016/06/17/small-memory-jvm-techniqu... . So with some work it can be reduced from 500Mi->100Mi per instance. It'd be interesting to see the kind of CPU time it uses under load, though.
Comment linking /2016/06/17/small-memory-jvm-techniques-for-microservice-sidecars/
on “Building a Bank with Kubernetes [slides]”Submitted Linkerd 1.0 as a story · 179 points
HN discussionlinkerd contains some advanced features, that are not easily solvable with DNS. By sending specific headers (and having your application forward them) one can have per request routing[1] and/or tracing[2]. [1] https://blog.buoyant.io/2016/11/04/a-service-mesh-for-kubern... [2] https://blog.buoyant.io/2017/03/14/a-service-mesh-for-kubern...
Comment linking /2017/03/14/a-service-mesh-for-kubernetes-part-vii-distributed-tracing-made-easy/
on “Linkerd 1.0”Submitted Linkerd-tcp: A lightweight, service-discovery-aware, TLS-ing TCP load balancer as a story · 170 points
HN discussionThat's what this does and more. What you described are techniques. Linkered is an implementation. From https://blog.buoyant.io/2017/04/25/whats-a-service-mesh-and-... Linkerd applies dynamic routing rules to determine which service the requester intended. Should the request be routed to a service in production or in staging? To a service in a local datacenter or one in the cloud? To the most recent version of a serv…
Comment linking /2017/04/25/whats-a-service-mesh-and-why-do-i-need-one/
on “Linkerd 1.0”Submitted Linkerd: Twitter-Style Operability for Microservices as a story · 136 points
HN discussionYou might like this post: https://blog.buoyant.io/2017/01/31/making-things-faster-by-a...
Comment linking /2017/01/31/making-things-faster-by-adding-more-steps/
on “Linkerd 1.0”Submitted Linkerd Joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a story · 80 points
HN discussion"The concept of the service mesh as a separate layer is tied to the rise of the cloud native application. In the cloud native model, a single application might consist of hundreds of services; each service might have thousands of instances; and each of those instances might be in a constantly-changing state as they are dynamically scheduled an orchestrator like Kubernetes. Not only is service communication in this w…
Comment linking /2017/04/25/whats-a-service-mesh-and-why-do-i-need-one/
on “Linkerd 1.0”Submitted A Service Mesh for Kubernetes, Part I: Top-Line Service Metrics as a story · 71 points
HN discussionRead William's post entitled "What's a service mesh?": https://blog.buoyant.io/2017/04/25/whats-a-service-mesh-and-...
Comment linking /2017/04/25/whats-a-service-mesh-and-why-do-i-need-one/
on “Linkerd 1.0”Submitted The Linkerd Service Mesh API as a story · 36 points
HN discussionthere's quite a bit here - https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank-bac... and https://blog.buoyant.io/2016/10/14/a-service-mesh-for-kubern... But you should ping linkerd on twitter. They are really responsive.
Comment linking /2016/10/14/a-service-mesh-for-kubernetes-part-ii-pods-are-great-until-theyre-not/
on “Linkerd Joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation”Submitted Linkerd on DC/OS for Service Discovery and Visibility as a story · 22 points
HN discussionRequest-level versus connection-level load balancing. See e.g. https://blog.buoyant.io/2016/03/16/beyond-round-robin-load-b...
Comment linking /2016/03/16/beyond-round-robin-load-balancing-for-latency/
on “A Service Mesh for Kubernetes, Part I: Top-Line Service Metrics”Submitted Squeezing blood from a stone: small-memory JVM tricks for microservice sidecars as a story · 21 points
HN discussion> Why not DNS round-robin? Round-robin may be sufficient for your needs. However, the load balancing techniques that linkerd employs solved real production issues for us. These techniques allowed us to be paged less frequently for minor errors and we could more reliably make changes to the system without causing user-facing issues. See https://blog.buoyant.io/2016/03/16/beyond-round-robin-load-b...
Comment linking /2016/03/16/beyond-round-robin-load-balancing-for-latency/
on “Connecting Kubernetes services with linkerd”Submitted A Service Mesh for Kubernetes, Part III: Encrypting All the Things as a story · 16 points
HN discussionI think that Linkerd is totally awesome and that it's definitely not receiving the attention that it deserves. One may think that Linkerd only fits in large projects but having that layer that manages the communication between my apps/microservice represents a huge boost forward for any project regardless its size. With Linkerd you're relying on the expertise of a team with vast knowledge on the field. For those of…
Comment linking /2016/06/17/small-memory-jvm-techniques-for-microservice-sidecars/
on “Announcing Linkerd 1.0”Submitted A Service Mesh for Kubernetes: Continuous Deployment via Traffic Shifting as a story · 15 points
HN discussionTotally understand why they did it but couldn't help chuckling since 6 months ago in this blogpost: https://blog.buoyant.io/2017/12/05/introducing-conduit/ they literally said: "Conduit is not Linkerd 2.0." ;-)
Comment linking /2017/12/05/introducing-conduit/
on “Buoyant's Conduit Officially Becomes Linkerd 2”Submitted A Service Mesh for Kubernetes: Distributed Tracing as a story · 14 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making Things Faster by Adding More Steps as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSubmitted Beyond Round Robin: Load Balancing for Latency as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSubmitted Linkerd: Twitter-Style Operability for Microservices as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making microservices more resilient with circuit breaking as a story · 11 points
HN discussionSubmitted HTTP/2, gRPC, and the future of linkerd as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making microservices more resilient with circuit breaking as a story · 9 points
HN discussion
