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This year’s KubeCon in sunny Valencia was once again full of amazing Linkerd news! The CNCF’s service mesh micro-survey showed Linkerd usage skyrocketing, with 73% using or planning to use Linkerd in the next year. The world’s lightest, fastest, most secure service mesh is now fully managed. And most importantly, we heard from a ton of happy Linkerd production users!
If you missed KubeCon or weren’t able to attend some of the great Linkerd talks, don’t worry, you can watch them all here at your convenience.
Sharing pitfalls and lessons learned about Linkerd is probably one of the most important ways to contribute to the project. By talking about their implementation, production users truly help peers earlier in their adoption journey. That’s why we are always incredibly excited to see Linkerd users on stage. So a big thanks to everyone who shared their story this KubeCon!
If you are interested in doing the same but need some help, we have a program for that: the Linkerd Community Anchor. Whether you want to submit a KubeCon talk, write a blog post, or need some help writing social media posts about your use case, our team is here to assist you!
Watch this talk from Chris Voss about how Microsoft’s Xbox team deployed Linkerd to apply mTLS, observability, and reliability to 22K meshed pods across 26 clusters. Their app is massive: 300+ games in 26 countries, 26 clusters across 18 regions, each with over 50 microservices and 700 to 1,000 pods — all meshed with Linkerd.
Bink’s Mark Swarbrick outlines how Linkerd gave the fintech startup the confidence to partner up with Barclays and serve millions of customers in the UK. The Bink team containerized their apps in 2016, migrated to the cloud, and moved their apps to Kubernetes. After experiencing issues with the unstable networking infrastructure, they decided to try Linkerd, and network faults caused by the instabilities dropped significantly. The timing could not have been better. Bink was starting conversations with Barclays, and Linkerd’s metrics allowed them to monitor their SLOs and agree to the bank’s ambitious latency and success-rated based SLAs.
In this panel, end users from various industries share how they use Linkerd in real-world production scenarios. They discuss how they apply mTLS to encrypt and secure all service-to-service communication, load balancing gRPC requests, and troubleshoot services before they’re pushed to production. Panelists represent various companies with different environments, goals, and priorities, and discussions focus on real-world outcomes.
Linkerd Ambassador Fredrik Klingenberg joins Jonas Samuelson to share how If-Insurance built an agile platform based on Kubernetes, Linkerd, and GitOps within the constraints of a highly regulated industry.
From a keynote at ServiceMeshCon to a deep dive into how Linkerd achieves zero-config to a packed workshop on failover with Linkerd, there was lots of great content from the Buoyant team as well.
In his ServiceMeshCon keynote, William Morgan delivered a project update on the extremely boring world of Linkerd. He covered all the uninteresting things happening in this boring project and discussed some of its profoundly non-exciting approaches to some perfectly ordinary challenges.
Zero-config is one of Linkerd’s claims to fame. For (most) Kubernetes apps, adding Linkerd doesn’t require any configuration — even if the application uses arbitrary TCP protocols, which Linkerd transparently proxies. The use of protocol detection automatically determines the protocol based on the data on the connection. Linkerd maintainer Kevin Leimkuhler describes how Linkerd’s protocol detection works, covering the strengths and weaknesses of the current implementation, including so-called server-speaks-first protocols and why they need to be handled differently.
Failover across clusters helps improve the general uptime and reliability of Kubernetes apps. Although whole-cluster failover can be achieved at the global ingress layer, failing over individual services is more difficult. In this workshop, Charles Pretzer walks attendees through using Linkerd to enable traffic failover for individual services across clusters. He’ll show how to combine service mesh metrics, traffic shifting, and cross-cluster communication in a cohesive and automated way utilizing pure open source while preserving fundamental security guarantees such as mTLS.
Cloud native apps with multiple services running in Kubernetes clusters can become hard to maintain and evolve. We often hear from developers who can’t run all their services locally and start running into trouble. That’s when they realize they need new tooling and approaches for observing and debugging apps spread across local dev machines and remote clusters. Check out this video to learn how Linkerd and Telepresence offer a simple way to observe better and debug applications running in your clusters.
Linkerd maintainer Matei David presents an overview of the project and an update on upcoming releases. He covers what Linkerd is and how it compares to other service meshes; what the latest features and functionality are; what to expect in upcoming releases; and how you can get involved. Matei also covers Linkerd’s recently-introduced policy, circuit breaking, and header-based routing features.
That’s a lot of great Linkerd content! We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. For more Linkerd, sign up for Buoyant’s Service Mesh Academy!
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