Increasing delivery velocity with a service mesh at Indeed

Description

For any tech company, problems with interprocess communication arise when features aren’t ported between languages. When you’re not supporting multiple languages, development teams have to choose between implementing their features in their language of choice or using the company’s existing stack. This problem grows in correlation with the growth of a company, a problem Indeed became quite familiar with.

Joshua Shanks discusses how Indeed increases its delivery velocity by using a service mesh for their communication features. With this approach, Indeed product teams no longer need to worry about service discovery, load balancing, or retries, and they get rate limiting and authentication for free. This has led to faster, happier teams.

Indeed deployed Linkerd as a sidecar on its private cloud to enable some of its interprocess communication goals. With this deployment, HTTP/2 is now generally available, and teams can choose between gRPC and REST when building out services. Indeed can now provide a consistent and predictable experience for teams, no matter what language or framework they decide to use. By moving communication logic to the service mesh, teams can now focus on their feature work, choose the language they want to develop in, and not have to worry about communication overhead.