“However, it’s 2024 and stuff that used to be free isn’t anymore. The free money train from VCs has ended and the bill has come due.”
Buoyant put Linkerd’s stable releases behind a $2000 per cluster per month enterprise tier. Cisco bought Isovalent and Cilium with it. Consul now starts at $0.027 an hour and climbs from there. Istio stays free, and you pay for it with a full-time Istio expert. The open source mesh was the free sample. The invoice was always coming.