linkerd vs Jersey: What are the differences?

What is linkerd? Twitter-Style Operability for Microservices. linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing.

What is Jersey? *A REST framework that provides a JAX-RS implementation *. It is open source, production quality, framework for developing RESTful Web Services in Java that provides support for JAX-RS APIs and serves as a JAX-RS (JSR 311 & JSR 339) Reference Implementation. It provides it’s own API that extend the JAX-RS toolkit with additional features and utilities to further simplify RESTful service and client development.

linkerd and Jersey can be primarily classified as "Microservices" tools.

Some of the features offered by linkerd are:

• Adaptive load-balancing
• Fine-grained instrumentation
• Abstractions over service discovery

On the other hand, Jersey provides the following key features:

• Track the JAX-RS API and provide regular releases of production quality Reference Implementations that ships with GlassFish
• Provide APIs to extend Jersey & Build a community of users and developers
• Make it easy to build RESTful Web services utilizing Java and the Java Virtual Machine.

linkerd is an open source tool with 5.1K GitHub stars and 514 GitHub forks. Here's a link to linkerd's open source repository on GitHub.

Bodybuilding.com, Unruly, and My Eye Media LLC are some of the popular companies that use Jersey, whereas linkerd is used by CentralApp, RELEX Solutions, and Cuemby. Jersey has a broader approval, being mentioned in 9 company stacks & 22 developers stacks; compared to linkerd, which is listed in 12 company stacks and 17 developer stacks.