Buoyant Blog

Now that we understand what a service mesh is and why you need one, and have deployed it in our environment, we'll focus on a core day two concern: how to effectively monitor your network with the CNCF-graduated service mesh.

We're happy to announce the release of Linkerd 2.14 with improved support for multi-cluster deployments on shared flat networks, full Gateway API conformance, and much more. The new release comes four months after our massive Linkerd 2.13 release with circuit breaking and dynamic request routing and continues Linkerd's focus on coupling enterprise-grade power and flexibility.

This KubeCrash will dive deep into multi-cluster deployments at enterprise scale, using a single stateful demo app throughout the presentations. We’ll tie clusters into a single network, allow for automated cluster-wide certificate hierarchies, enable cost-effective cross-cluster communications, and set up Kubernetes guardrails to avoid misconfiguration-based app failure, all while using a distributed database to ensure surviving failures of individual pieces.

If you're using Kubernetes, you've probably heard the term "sidecar" by now. What might surprise you, however, is that Kubernetes itself has no built-in notion of sidecars—at least, until now.

Any organization working in the cloud has to manage multiple, complex challenges to security and reliability, while keeping a tight rein on costs. Your brand’s reputation depends on managing these challenges with aplomb, ensuring that you handle threats and failures quickly, transparently, and efficiently.

Multi-cluster Kubernetes refers to managing multiple Kubernetes clusters, which are groups of nodes working together to orchestrate and run containerized applications. These clusters can be distributed across different data centers, regions, or cloud providers to ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and better performance.

The automat of the 50s was a marvel. It was a vending machine that served hot food. It was a restaurant without waiters. It was a miracle of modern technology. For the first time, people could serve themselves without having to wait for a waiter to take their order, and without having to wait for the food to be prepared.

As discussed in my introduction to Linkerd, service meshes provide important, powerful security, reliability, and observability features. And although many engineers shy away from implementing a service mesh due to its perceived complexity, there is no real reason to wait if you use Linkerd.