Imagine Learning says Linkerd has become the backbone of its cloud-native infrastructure, a story the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has spotlighted in a new blog post.
The education technology provider, which serves millions of users on Amazon EKS, described Linkerd as essential to ensuring that its platform could handle rapid growth and the demands of online learning at scale. The company highlighted improvements in reliability, scalability, and security, noting that these gains coincided with a 20% reduction in operational overhead.
While the CNCF blog provided a high-level perspective on the company’s journey, more detailed results are documented in a Buoyant case study. The case study noted that Linkerd reduced compute requirements by over 80%, cut service mesh-related CVEs by 97% in 2024, and is projected to lower regional data transfer networking costs by at least 40%. They also described Linkerd’s simplicity, performance, and security as central to their decision to adopt it. According to the case study, streamlined configuration meant the mesh could be deployed reliably within hours, which shortened onboarding time for engineers and reduced the risk of downtime during rollout.
Other organisations in different sectors have described similar experiences. Hokstad Consulting reported that, in testing, Linkerd required lower CPU and memory use than Istio in their benchmarks, which they said resulted in reduced cost and overhead. This illustrated how the technology could meet the needs of platforms with large transaction volumes and availability requirements. In another example, travel company loveholidays explained that the service mesh “caught hundreds of failed deployments early, improved conversion rates by 2.61%, and reduced network costs.” The company tied these improvements to both customer experience and financial results.
Analysts and commentators have also provided independent perspectives on Linkerd’s design. Solo.io, which offers tools around Istio, notes in its comparison that “Linkerd uses a Rust-based micro proxy called Linkerd2-proxy, which drives the entire data plane and offers good performance in smaller environments.”
Taken together, the CNCF blog, the Buoyant case study, and external reports show a range of evidence on Linkerd’s reported impact. Imagine Learning’s story highlights its application in education technology at scale, while other case studies from gaming and travel illustrate its use in industries with very different requirements. Analysts’ commentary adds further context about why its architecture may lead to reduced costs and operational complexity. Across these perspectives, Linkerd is consistently described as enabling improvements in reliability, efficiency, and security for organisations adopting cloud-native practices.
