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Windows Mesh Expansion (WME) with Linkerd

August 17, 2026

When you mesh your Kubernetes services, you get automatic mTLS, authorization policy enforcement and golden metrics. But what about your Windows servers running your legacy and line-of-business apps? Can they benefit from all the service mesh magic? 

Yes! With Windows mesh expansion (part of Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd), you can. It pulls Windows VMs and bare-metal hosts into your Linkerd mesh and you get all of the Linkerd goodness wherever those machines run, whether on-prem or in the cloud. Behind it all is a Windows kernel-mode driver that transparently redirects traffic through the Linkerd proxy, Microsoft WHQL-signed for Windows Server so it runs on production machines out of the box. In this Service Mesh Academy, we'll go under the hood on how it works. Join us to see what a truly Windows-inclusive mesh looks like!