The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has announced the graduation of Linkerd. Linkerd was the first project to join the CNCF Sandbox, known as inception at the time, and is now the first service mesh project to achieve graduated status.

Linkerd is working on an extensive roadmap, including server and client-side policies, “mesh expansion” to allow the Linkerd data plane to operate outside of Kubernetes, and much more.

In keeping with the project’s focus on simplicity, performance, and end-user experience, these features will be developed to minimize overhead and operational complexity for the user.

To officially graduate from incubating status, Linkerd demonstrated the project maturity expected of a stable and well-established project, including rapidly-growing adoption and a commitment to a sustainable and inclusive community.

Linkerd was created in 2016 by Buoyant and joined CNCF in early 2017 as the foundation’s fifth project.