Unnecessary and complicated for whom? If you don't need circuit breaking, retry windows, metrics, ack/nack and advanced load balancing techniques for your platform then you are not the target market. Nobody is forcing you to use it.
Re:Linkerd 1.0
by fernandotakai on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @06:32PM
(#14198763)
if you have a bunch of thrift servers, linkerd is a must. it really makes handling thrift connections much easier.
[dead]
To pick one example - TCP will get you automatic retry of sending bytes but it knows nothing about the semantics of the layers built on top of it. If your HTTP request to a backend service fails with a 502 - do you try again on the same server? different server? fail the whole thing that was depending on that HTTP request succeeding? TCP can't answer that question for you because it doesn't even know if you're doing a GET or a POST, or what a 502 means.
Need I say more? Paging Alan Kay to tell these folks what the origins of an unnecessary complicated mess looks like.