Nov 6, 2025
San Francisco – November 6, 2025 – Buoyant, the creators of Linkerd, a leading open source and service mesh for the enterprise, today announced upcoming support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Linkerd to extend its core service mesh capabilities to this new type of 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.
As organizations adopt AI, they introduce new types of agentic communication, such as MCP, a protocol that connects AI models with external data sources and tools in a standardized way. Agentic communication is unique compared to the API traffic that dominates enterprise environments today 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, creating a high-risk environment that most organizations are not equipped to manage. The rate at which AI initiatives are being pushed at an enterprise level amplifies the urgent need for more security and observability for application traffic.
“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.”
Managing complex network traffic is Linkerd's proven area of expertise. 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. Specifically, this upcoming offering will provide:
- Observability of MCP traffic with metrics on resource, tool, and prompt usage, including failure rates, latencies, and volume of data transmitted. This allows enterprises to build a comprehensive operational view of agentic behavior while monitoring and alerting on unusual activity.
- 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 allows enterprises to restrict access to specific tools or resources exposed by MCP servers based on the identity of the agent and implement a zero-trust approach to agentic security.
"The security concerns around MCP were initially a big factor as we started considering rolling out AI more broadly across the organization," said Blake Romano, Senior Engineer at Imagine Learning. "Because we already use and trust Linkerd's enterprise capabilities, especially its strong security posture and built-in observability, it removes a major barrier to adoption. Having clear visibility into our MCP communication will give us the confidence to innovate faster, safer, and more reliably."
By integrating MCP support at the service mesh layer, Linkerd eliminates the need for additional, specialized tooling and provides a single pane of glass for all traffic. Linkerd is the only service mesh that offers support for MCP integrated into the core functionality, meaning that platform teams can benefit from using the same trusted workflows and consistent policies in Linkerd to manage both traditional and AI workloads.
Buoyant will be demoing MCP support in Linkerd at Kubecon North America taking place in Atlanta, GA, on November 10-13th in booth 440. MCP support will be fully available soon in both open source Linkerd and the enterprise distribution from Buoyant. To learn more, sign up to join the early access program.
About Buoyant
Buoyant is the creator of Linkerd, the first open-source service mesh for cloud-native applications. Linkerd provides a lightweight, high-performance solution for securing, observing, and managing service-to-service communication in Kubernetes environments. Buoyant is dedicated to ensuring that organizations can adopt cloud-native technologies without compromising on performance or security. For more information, visit buoyant.io.
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