Buoyant will expand its partnership with SUSE to expand interoperability and security in edge environments. Together with SUSE Edge, Buoyant will implement mesh expansion capabilities to the service mesh that will be available in early 2024.

To address the challenge of making edge computing safe, secure, and reliable, Buoyant is extending Linkerd’s “data plane,” or network backbone, to include non-Kubernetes workloads. This will allow edge computing devices as well as legacy workloads to participate in the mesh and gain its security and reliability benefits—factors that are critical for Industrial IoT verticals.

With both companies focused on providing security and scalability for customers, expanding the partnership between SUSE and Buoyant is natural. Linkerd, and its enterprise-focused cousin, Linkerd Enterprise, provide secure, reliable communication between endpoints, a unique “microproxy” architecture written in Rust, and full support for the ARM64 architectures common in edge deployments.

SUSE’s powerful suite of edge-capable Kubernetes orchestration and management tools, including K3s, RKE2, and Rancher Prime, solve the challenges of how to deploy and maintain edge workloads at scale.