Buoyant

Buoyant is the creator of Linkerd, the CNCF-graduated service mesh for Kubernetes. Linkerd provides zero-trust security via mutual TLS, ultra-high availability with automated failover, and observability for microservices including AI/LLM workloads. Buoyant Enterprise Linkerd adds enterprise features including FIPS 140-2/140-3 validated encryption and multi-cluster support.

Buoyant is listed with 3 APIs on the APIs.io network. Tagged areas include AI Observability, Kubernetes, Linkerd, mTLS, and Observability.

Buoyant’s developer surface includes developer portal, documentation, engineering blog, pricing, API reference, getting-started guide, support, and 34 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Profile data on GitHub

52.6/100 developing ▬ flat Agent 18/100 agent aware open core · Apache-2.0 Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-10-17 · rubric v0.24.0

AccessFreemium

3 APIs

AI Observability KubernetesLinkerdmTLS Observability Service Mesh Zero Trust

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-10-17 · rubric v0.24.0

Composite quality — 52.6/100 · developing

Contract Quality 4.5 / 19

Developer Ergonomics 10.7 / 15

Access Clarity 9.1 / 15

Operational Transparency 3.6 / 10

Contract Governance 0.4 / 9

Discoverability 5.2 / 8

Regulatory Posture 4.7 / 15

Open Source Surface 10.0 / 10

Agent readiness — 18/100 · agent aware

Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 0 / 10

Documented Reversibility 0 / 6

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8

Request/Response Examples 0 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 0 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4

Delegated User Identity 0 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5

Registration Without a Human 0 / 6

Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Horizontal (data, software, accessibility, platform) regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

Open Source Surface applies to this provider. This product is open source and we read its repository directly, so Open Source Surface carries 10 points of the composite. It is scored from what the repository actually publishes — a security policy, a contribution guide, a release history, a code of conduct — read live from the provider rather than inferred from our own catalog pointers. This facet adds; nothing was taken away to make room for it. An open-source project is not excused from the commercial facets, because exemption would strip it of the points it does earn. If we have the wrong repository, or this product is not open source, say so on your provider repo and we will drop the facet rather than have you publish against it.

Create-or-Update Ergonomics could not be measured. We hold no machine-readable contract for this provider to read, so there is nothing to measure a write surface against. Excluded rather than scored zero: never-measured and measured-empty are different facts. Publishing an OpenAPI is what makes this facet — and several others — scorable at all.

The six quality facets above are damped to 75 points between them, because both conditional facets apply and carry 25 points together. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 75% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/buoyant: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Markets this provider is in provisional

The Kin Score Market layer reads a provider inside its market: its position, and how deep its integrations go. Depth is only comparable within a position. Provisional and unweighted: not part of the Kin Score or agent readiness.

Market	Position	Depth	Registered MCP server	Declares compatibility
API Management (gateways, portals, service mesh, proxies)	standard	47.0	-	1

Registered MCP server and declares compatibility are report only — not weighted. Undeclared means we found nothing we can read, so there is no number: we never infer integrations.

Standards implemented 1

Standards this provider implements or carries. De facto ones are profiled and measured by the API Commons; formal ones come from the standards directory and are linked by the provider's own tags. The evidence column says how each claim was established — not that it was made.

Mutual TLS

tagged — the provider's own APIs.json carries the standard as a tag; implementation not verified

APIs 3

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

Linkerd Service Mesh

Linkerd is a CNCF-graduated service mesh for Kubernetes that transparently adds mutual TLS encryption, latency-aware load balancing, retries, timeouts, circuit breaking, and obs...

Buoyant Enterprise Linkerd (BEL)

Buoyant Enterprise Linkerd is the enterprise-supported distribution of Linkerd with additional features including FIPS-validated cryptography, lifecycle automation, multi-cluste...

Buoyant Cloud

Buoyant Cloud is the hosted control surface for Linkerd fleets — health checks, golden metrics, multi-cluster link management and automated Linkerd upgrades. Clusters connect th...

Pricing Plans 1

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Buoyant Plans Pricing

3 plans

PLANS

Rate Limits 1

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Buoyant Rate Limits

0 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Buoyant Finops

FINOPS

Security Posture 3

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Buoyant Authentication

2 schemes

SECURITY

Buoyant Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DNSSEC · DMARC

SECURITY

Buoyant Vulnerability Disclosure

Hackerone

SECURITY

Resources

Get Started 3

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

Portal

Portal

GettingStarted

GettingStarted

Login

Documentation 4

Reference material describing how the API behaves

ContributionGuide

Documentation

Documentation

APIReference

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

LLMsTxt

LLMsTxt

Design & Contract 3

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

Conventions

Conventions

Conformance

Conformance

Lifecycle

Lifecycle

Build 6

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

CodeOfConduct

CodeOfConduct

GitHubOrganization

GitHubOrganization

GitHubOrganization

Packages

SDKs

CLI

Access & Security 6

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

SecurityPolicy

DomainSecurity

Authentication

Compliance

VulnerabilityDisclosure

VulnerabilityDisclosure

Security

Security

Operate 9

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

IssueTracker

Releases

Slack

Community

Support

HelpCenter

Deprecation

ChangeLog

RateLimits

Scroll for all 9

Commercial 5

Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use

FinOps

License

Pricing

PrivacyPolicy

Plans

Company 3

The organization behind the API

Website

Website

LinkedIn

Blog

Blog

Other 1

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

Protobuf

Protobuf

Source (apis.yml)

aid: buoyant
name: Buoyant
description: Buoyant is the creator of Linkerd, the CNCF-graduated service mesh for Kubernetes. Linkerd provides zero-trust
  security via mutual TLS, ultra-high availability with automated failover, and observability for microservices including
  AI/LLM workloads. Buoyant Enterprise Linkerd adds enterprise features including FIPS 140-2/140-3 validated encryption and
  multi-cluster support.
type: Index
kind: company
deliveryModel:
  model: open-core
  license: Apache-2.0
  open_source: true
  commercial: true
  callable_host: false
  label: Open core · an OSS project plus a commercial hosted product
  confidence: high
  source:
  - license
  - pricing
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: freemium
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Freemium
  confidence: medium
  source:
  - plans
  generated: '2026-07-22'
  method: derived
position: Consuming
access: 3rd-Party
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/buoyant.png
tags:
- AI Observability
- Kubernetes
- Linkerd
- mTLS
- Observability
- Service Mesh
- Zero Trust
created: '2026-01-02'
modified: '2026-09-04'
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/buoyant/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
specificationVersion: '0.23'
apis:
- aid: buoyant:linkerd
  name: Linkerd Service Mesh
  description: Linkerd is a CNCF-graduated service mesh for Kubernetes that transparently adds mutual TLS encryption, latency-aware
    load balancing, retries, timeouts, circuit breaking, and observability to any Kubernetes workload without code changes.
    Supports HTTP, HTTP/2, gRPC, and TCP traffic.
  humanURL: https://linkerd.io/
  image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/buoyant.png
  tags:
  - Kubernetes
  - mTLS
  - Observability
  - Service Mesh
  - Zero Trust
  properties:
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://linkerd.io/docs/
  - type: Website
    url: https://linkerd.io/
  - type: Reference
    url: https://linkerd.io/docs/reference/
  - type: GitHubRepository
    url: https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2
  - type: Protobuf
    name: Linkerd proxy API — Destination
    url: grpc/buoyant-linkerd-proxy-api-destination.proto
  - type: Protobuf
    name: Linkerd proxy API — Identity
    url: grpc/buoyant-linkerd-proxy-api-identity.proto
  - type: Protobuf
    name: Linkerd proxy API — Inbound server policies
    url: grpc/buoyant-linkerd-proxy-api-inbound.proto
  - type: Protobuf
    name: Linkerd proxy API — Outbound policies
    url: grpc/buoyant-linkerd-proxy-api-outbound.proto
  - type: Protobuf
    name: Linkerd proxy API — Tap
    url: grpc/buoyant-linkerd-proxy-api-tap.proto
  - type: Protobuf
    name: Linkerd Viz metrics API
    url: grpc/buoyant-linkerd-viz-metrics-api.proto
  - type: Protobuf
    name: Linkerd Viz tap API
    url: grpc/buoyant-linkerd-viz-tap.proto
  - type: SourceCode
    url: https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2-proxy-api
  x-features:
  - Mutual TLS for transparent encryption and authentication
  - Cryptographic workload identity
  - Latency-aware load balancing
  - Automated retries, timeouts, and circuit breaking
  - Zone-aware routing (HAZL) to reduce cross-zone costs
  - Canary and blue-green deployment support
  - AI/LLM observability for resource, tool, and prompt usage metrics
  - Multi-cluster failover
  - FIPS 140-2/140-3 validated encryption (Enterprise)
  x-use-cases:
  - Zero-trust Kubernetes networking
  - Service-to-service mutual TLS without code changes
  - Observability for microservices and AI workloads
  - Multi-cluster Kubernetes deployments
  - Migration between cloud providers
- aid: buoyant:buoyant-enterprise-linkerd
  name: Buoyant Enterprise Linkerd (BEL)
  description: Buoyant Enterprise Linkerd is the enterprise-supported distribution of Linkerd with additional features including
    FIPS-validated cryptography, lifecycle automation, multi-cluster networking, and enterprise SLA support.
  humanURL: https://buoyant.io/linkerd-enterprise
  image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/buoyant.png
  tags:
  - Enterprise
  - FIPS
  - Kubernetes
  - Service Mesh
  properties:
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://docs.buoyant.io/buoyant-enterprise-linkerd/latest/overview/
  - type: Website
    url: https://buoyant.io/linkerd-enterprise
  - type: Reference
    url: https://docs.buoyant.io/buoyant-enterprise-linkerd/latest/reference/
  - type: GettingStarted
    url: https://docs.buoyant.io/buoyant-enterprise-linkerd/latest/installation/
  - type: ChangeLog
    url: https://docs.buoyant.io/release-notes/buoyant-enterprise-linkerd/
  - type: Pricing
    url: https://www.buoyant.io/pricing
  - type: Packages
    url: packages/buoyant-packages.yml
- aid: buoyant:buoyant-cloud
  name: Buoyant Cloud
  description: 'Buoyant Cloud is the hosted control surface for Linkerd fleets — health checks, golden metrics, multi-cluster
    link management and automated Linkerd upgrades. Clusters connect through the Buoyant Cloud agent (the linkerd-buoyant
    Helm chart), which authenticates with an org-scoped client ID and secret and speaks gRPC to api.buoyant.cloud. There is
    no public REST developer API: the endpoint answers every non-gRPC request with HTTP 415 and grpc-status 3 (probed 2026-09-04),
    and Buoyant documents it only as the host its own agent calls.'
  humanURL: https://buoyant.cloud/
  image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/buoyant.png
  baseURL: https://api.buoyant.cloud
  tags:
  - Kubernetes
  - Observability
  - Service Mesh
  properties:
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://docs.buoyant.io/buoyant-cloud/getting-started/
  - type: Website
    url: https://buoyant.cloud/
  - type: Authentication
    url: authentication/buoyant-authentication.yml
  - type: SignUp
    url: https://buoyant.cloud/
  - type: ChangeLog
    url: https://docs.buoyant.io/release-notes/buoyant-cloud/
common:
- type: FinOps
  url: finops/buoyant-finops.yml
- type: Website
  url: https://buoyant.io/
- type: IssueTracker
  url: https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/issues
- type: Releases
  url: https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/releases
- type: SecurityPolicy
  url: https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/blob/main/SECURITY.md
- type: CodeOfConduct
  url: https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
- type: ContributionGuide
  url: https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md
- type: License
  name: Apache-2.0
  url: https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/blob/main/LICENSE
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/buoyant-domain-security.yml
- type: LinkedIn
  url: https://www.linkedin.com/company/buoyantio
- type: Portal
  url: https://buoyant.io/
- type: Documentation
  url: https://linkerd.io/docs/
- type: GitHubOrganization
  url: https://github.com/linkerd
- type: Blog
  url: https://buoyant.io/blog/
- type: Pricing
  url: https://buoyant.io/pricing/
- type: Slack
  url: https://slack.linkerd.io/
- type: Community
  url: https://linkerd.io/community/
- type: Integrations
  url: https://www.buoyant.io/partners
- type: Documentation
  name: Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd documentation
  url: https://docs.buoyant.io/buoyant-enterprise-linkerd/latest/overview/
- type: APIReference
  url: https://linkerd.io/docs/reference/
- type: GettingStarted
  url: https://linkerd.io/2/getting-started/
- type: Support
  url: https://www.buoyant.io/linkerd-support
- type: HelpCenter
  name: Buoyant Linkerd Forum
  url: https://linkerd.buoyant.io/
- type: PrivacyPolicy
  url: https://www.buoyant.io/privacy-policy
- type: Login
  url: https://buoyant.cloud/
- type: GitHubOrganization
  name: BuoyantIO
  url: https://github.com/BuoyantIO
- type: LLMsTxt
  url: llms/buoyant-llms.txt
- type: Packages
  url: packages/buoyant-packages.yml
- type: SDKs
  url: packages/buoyant-packages.yml
- type: CLI
  url: cli/buoyant-cli.yml
- type: Protobuf
  name: gRPC contract index
  url: grpc/buoyant-grpc.yml
- type: Authentication
  url: authentication/buoyant-authentication.yml
- type: Conventions
  url: conventions/buoyant-conventions.yml
- type: Conformance
  url: conformance/buoyant-conformance.yml
- type: Compliance
  url: conformance/buoyant-conformance.yml
- type: Lifecycle
  url: lifecycle/buoyant-lifecycle.yml
- type: Deprecation
  url: lifecycle/buoyant-lifecycle.yml
- type: ChangeLog
  url: changelog/buoyant-changelog.yml
- type: VulnerabilityDisclosure
  url: security/buoyant-vulnerability-disclosure.yml
- type: Security
  url: security/buoyant-vulnerability-disclosure.yml
- type: Plans
  url: plans/buoyant-plans-pricing.yml
- type: RateLimits
  url: rate-limits/buoyant-rate-limits.yml
integrations:
- name: Service Mesh Academy
- name: AWS
- name: Suse
- name: IntelliGCR
- name: Microsoft
- name: krumware
- name: testifysec
- name: Datadog
- name: close nav
- name: Linkedin
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-09-04'
  status: enriched
  artifacts_added: 25
  pass: local-v3

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