Señors at Scale - Software Engineering & Tech Leadership

ServiceMesh at Scale with William Morgan, creator of Linkerd

05 Apr 2026

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William Morgan is the CEO of Buoyant and the creator of Linkerd, the world's first service mesh and a CNCF graduated project powering production Kubernetes infrastructure at thousands of companies. Before founding Buoyant, William spent nearly four years at Twitter as a software engineer and engineering manager, where he shipped core platform features like the Twitter photo service and embed timelines — and watched the legendary monolith-to-microservices transformation unfold firsthand.In this episode, we cover what it was like engineering at Twitter during the fail whale era, how decomposing a monolith introduces entirely new networking challenges, why William invented the term "service mesh," and how Linkerd gives platform teams reliability, security, and observability without developers having to think about it.Whether you're a platform engineer running Kubernetes in production, an SRE trying to make sense of service-to-service communication, or a developer curious about what infrastructure teams actually do — this conversation is packed with hard-won lessons from a decade of building critical open source infrastructure.🔸 Key Topics:- Engineering at Twitter in 2010: the Rails monolith, Scala rewrite, and microservices transformation- How replacing function calls with network calls changes everything- What a service mesh is and why the term had to be invented- Control plane vs data plane architecture- Why Linkerd rewrote its proxy from Scala/JVM to Rust- Latency-aware load balancing, mTLS, and protocol detection- Multi-cluster communication and mesh expansion to VMs- Common service mesh implementation mistakes- Linkerd vs Istio: William's honest take- Open source sustainability and enterprise monetization- The enterprise sales journey from engineer to CEO- Book recommendations: Hyperion, Gideon the Ninth, The Book of the New Sun🔗 FOLLOW WILLIAM💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wmorgan/🐦 X/Twitter: https://x.com/wm🌐 Buoyant: https://buoyant.io🎙️ FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev🎙 Podcast URL: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale📬 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/señors-scale/📚 ADDITIONAL RESOURCES- Linkerd: https://linkerd.io- Buoyant: https://buoyant.io- Linkerd Getting Started: https://docs.buoyant.io- Linkerd GitHub (Proxy): https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2-proxy- Hyperion by Dan Simmons- Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir- The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe- Simon Willison's Blog (AI/LLMs): https://simonwillison.net#Linkerd #ServiceMesh #Kubernetes #Rust #CloudNative #Buoyant #CNCF #Microservices #Infrastructure #PlatformEngineering #SoftwareEngineering #SenorsAtScale💬 What's the most complex networking issue you've debugged in a microservices environment? Share your war stories in the comments!

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3ª PARTE | 17 DIC 2025 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

01 Jan 1970

El Partidazo de COPE

13:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

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12:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

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10:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

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13:00H | 20 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

01 Jan 1970

Fin de Semana

12:00H | 20 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

01 Jan 1970

Fin de Semana

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Señors at Scale - Software Engineering & Tech Leadership

ServiceMesh at Scale with William Morgan, creator of Linkerd

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet

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3ª PARTE | 17 DIC 2025 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

13:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

12:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

10:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

13:00H | 20 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

12:00H | 20 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

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Señors at Scale - Software Engineering &amp; Tech Leadership

ServiceMesh at Scale with William Morgan, creator of Linkerd

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet

Other recent transcribed episodes

3ª PARTE | 17 DIC 2025 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

13:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

12:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

10:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

13:00H | 20 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

12:00H | 20 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

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Señors at Scale - Software Engineering & Tech Leadership