Buoyant, the creators of the Linkerd open source and service mesh for the enterprise, have announced the addition of support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Linkerd to extend its core service mesh capabilities to agentic AI traffic.

This capability is designed to help enterprises accelerate AI adoption by giving a safe, reliable, and observable foundation for MCP traffic in Kubernetes environments. Linkerd works by transparently inserting its functionality at the platform layer rather than the application layer.

The new support is being added because of the increasing requirement from organizations who are adopting AI and introducing new types of agentic communication, such as  MCP, to connect AI models with external data sources and tools in a standardized way.

The Linkerd team says agentic communication differs from standard API traffic because the communication pulls from past interactions, takes place over a persistent session, and may require complex, multi-task steps.

Compared to standard enterprise workloads, AI workloads are unpredictable, introduce novel security challenges, and can create massive spikes in traffic that most organizations are not equipped to manage. 

"Enterprises are eager to innovate with AI, but they can't do so at the expense of their security posture and application reliability,"

said William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant.

"Linkerd solves this problem by extending its proven capabilities to MCP traffic. We're not just enabling AI adoption, we're giving organizations the tools to accelerate their usage with confidence."

Linkerd was already strong for managing complex network traffic, and the developers say that with the introduction of MCP support, Linkerd will provide the same visibility, access control, and traffic shaping capabilities that users rely on today for their existing set of protocols, extended to agentic traffic.

The new MCP traffic analysis has metrics on resource, tool, and prompt usage, including failure rates, latencies, and volume of data transmitted. Buoyant says this allows enterprises to build a comprehensive operational view of agentic behavior while monitoring and alerting on unusual activity.

The new feature also provides security for MCP traffic through fine-grained authorization policies for all MCP calls, using Linkerd's existing zero-trust framework built on cryptographic workload identity. This means a company can restrict access to specific tools or resources exposed by MCP servers based on the identity of the agent.

Buoyant says that by integrating MCP support at the service mesh layer, Linkerd eliminates the need for additional, specialized tooling. It is the only service mesh that offers support for MCP integrated into the core functionality. 

Buoyant will be demoing MCP support in Linkerd at Kubecon North America taking place in Atlanta, GA, on November 10-13th. MCP support will be fully available soon in both open source Linkerd and the enterprise distribution from Buoyant.

More Information

Linkerd on GitHub

Linkerd Website

Related Articles

Linkerd 2.18 Adds Protocol Declarations

Linkerd Adds Egress And Rate Limiting

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info