We definitely took some inspiration from projects like synapse. However, Finagle, the core tech behind linkerd, provides some extremely powerful tools to do th

We definitely took some inspiration from projects like synapse. However, Finagle, the core tech behind linkerd, provides some extremely powerful tools to do things like: - per-request routing to support things like "when I browse the site, use the staging version of the users service and production versions of all other services". (https://twitter.github.io/finagle/guide/Names.html#interpreting-paths-with-delegation-tables https://twitter.github.io/finagle/guide/Names.html#interpret...) - request cancellation, so that when a user request timeouts downstream work can be reclaimed - budget-based timeout management (https://twitter.github.io/finagle/guide/Servers.html#request-deadline https://twitter.github.io/finagle/guide/Servers.html#request...) - circuit breaking (https://twitter.github.io/finagle/guide/Clients.html#failure-accrual https://twitter.github.io/finagle/guide/Clients.html#failure...) - etc, etc. We think that offering these sorts of features in a sidecar model will be extremely powerful.