Tars vs linkerd: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Tars and Linkerd

1. Scope of functionality: Tars is primarily focused on providing a robust microservices framework, offering functionality for service communication, deployment, monitoring, and management. In contrast, Linkerd is more focused on providing service mesh capabilities for reliable service-to-service communication in distributed systems.

2. Service discovery and load balancing: Tars offers built-in support for service discovery and load balancing mechanisms, making it easier for developers to manage and scale their services. On the other hand, Linkerd integrates with service discovery tools like Kubernetes for resolving service endpoints and offers advanced load balancing features based on traffic patterns.

3. Data plane proxy: Tars utilizes its proprietary RPC framework for communication between services, while Linkerd utilizes lightweight proxies like Envoy to handle traffic between services, providing features like retries, timeouts, and circuit breaking at the proxy level.

4. Monitoring and observability: Tars includes monitoring tools for tracking service performance, resource usage, and health checks, but Linkerd offers more extensive observability features like distributed tracing, metrics collection, and service-level dashboards to give detailed insights into the service mesh behavior.

5. Security features: Tars provides security features like authentication, authorization, and encryption mechanisms for securing service communication within the framework itself. In comparison, Linkerd focuses on securing service communication through mTLS (mutual Transport Layer Security) and integrating with existing security tools like SPIFFE/SPIRE for identity management.

6. Community support and ecosystem: Tars has a strong community in China and Asia, with many production deployments in that region, while Linkerd has a more global community presence, active contributors, and integrations with popular tools and platforms like Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger.

In Summary, Tars and Linkerd differ in their scope of functionality, service discovery, data plane proxy usage, monitoring capabilities, security features, and community support.