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Is Docker Swarm Mode routing mesh a built-in substitute for linkerd routing mesh? In other words, is there still any reason to look into linkerd if there is an out-of-the-box solution?

William Morgan
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Dmitry Trofimov
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1 Answers1

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They do fundamentally different things. Docker's swarm mode routing mesh is at layer 3/4 --- if you have something running on port X in one container, you can have every container listen on port X and route that traffic to the container that's actually using it.

Linkerd's service mesh operates at layer 5/7. It does request-level failure and latency handling, load balancing across instances, and logical routing ("service a" => "datacenter 1, prod cluster, version 1.2 of service a")

You can use the two in conjunction.

William Morgan
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  • if i recall correctly even swarm does load balancing between instances of services. – db80 Aug 21 '18 at 10:16