Blog

Oct 21, 2020 | Kevin Leimkuhler

Setting up Kubernetes SLOs with Prometheus and Linkerd

SLOs are a lot easier with a service mesh in hand In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to easily create service health SLOs on Kubernetes with Prometheus, an open source time-series database, and Linkerd, an open source ultralight service mesh. You’ll see how using a service mesh can solve one of the hardest parts of SLOs: getting consistent metrics for the things you want to measure. But before we get started, let’s dig into why SLOs and Kubernetes go hand-in-hand.

Oct 12, 2020 | William Morgan

What's a service mesh? And why do I need one?

We’ve wrapped up all the advice in this post—and everything we’ve learned since—into a tailored evaluation process. Click here to begin: Do I need a service mesh? tl;dr: Service meshes like Linkerd and Istio are tools for adding observability, security, and reliability features to applications by inserting them at the platform layer rather than the application layer.

Sep 24, 2020 | William Morgan

Why Service Level Objectives (SLOs) Matter for Kubernetes

Service Level Objectives are a hot topic in the world of software reliability. SLOs are usually thought of as a way to balance risk vs. reward for a given application. Should we ship a new feature for this service, even though we might risk an outage? But for Kubernetes adopters, SLOs can provide something more: a consistent, uniform way to measure the health of every application in their cluster, in a way that requires little history or context about any particular app.

Sep 16, 2020 | Andrew Seigner

Rebuilding Linkerd's continuous integration (CI) with Kubernetes in Docker (kind) and GitHub Actions

This post is a writeup of a talk I gave last month at KubeCon EU 2020. Introduction In mid-2019, the Linkerd project’s continuous integration (CI) took 45 minutes, all tests were serialized on a single Kubernetes cluster, and multi-hour backups were common. A migration onto one-off Kubernetes in Docker (kind) clusters and GitHub Actions got CI below 10 minutes, and made it parallelizable. This post will detail Linkerd’s CI journey from a single, persistent Kubernetes cluster to theoretically unlimited one-off kind clusters.

Aug 11, 2020 | William Morgan

Linkerd Community Guide to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual

It might be virtual but this year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual is just as jam-packed with Linkerd content as usual. So if you’re attending the event, be sure and check out these sessions and participate in the online conversation during and afterwards. Kubecon Project Update Keynote On Tuesday, August 18 at 16:04 CEST (10:04 am EDT / 7:04 am PDT), Constance Caramanolis will share the Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects update, including an update on the Linkerd project.

Jul 20, 2020 | William Morgan

Linkerd case studies: meeting security requirements, reducing latency, and migrating from Istio

As the creators of Linkerd, Buoyant has been, for several years now, in the unique position of helping organizations around the globe adopt the service mesh. From the early days before “service mesh” was even a term, to the latest multi-cluster Kubernetes-based adoption, we’ve seen Linkerd usage grow rapidly across industries and verticals. And the pace is only increasing. But why are organizations adopting Linkerd? In this series of case studies, we showcase the production adoption of Linkerd at Nordstrom, finleap connect, Paybase, and Subspace.

Jul 20, 2020 | Charles Pretzer

Demo time: Multi-cluster Kubernetes with Linkerd 2.8

At the Camp Cloud Native virtual event on June 24, I had the opportunity to talk about how Linkerd 2.8 implements multi-cluster support simply and securely for anyone who needs services to operate reliability across pods, availability zones, or regions. Running multiple production Kubernetes clusters is an increasingly common practice, driven by requirements around high availability, latency reduction, business and regulatory requirements, and multi-tenancy. One of the biggest challenges of multi-cluster is the communication between clusters: especially for hybrid or multi-cloud deployments, where the network is necessarily heterogeneous, how does traffic flow between clusters in a way that …

Feb 27, 2020 | Charles Pretzer

Notes from the field: O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference NY

This week, the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference in New York invited us to work with a hardcore group of architects and engineers who are eager to learn about service mesh and how Linkerd fits into their infrastructure. This workshop follows hot on the heels of our ServiceMeshCon workshop last November, with Kubernetes administrators and enthusiasts from around the world. More than 40 folks from around the world attended the 3.5 hour session and pounded keys with us to get hands-on experience deploying Linkerd to Kubernetes clusters, graciously provided by DigitalOcean.

Dec 3, 2019 | Charles Pretzer

A Classy Cloud-Native Afternoon with Linkerd and DigitalOcean in San Diego

KubeCon has quickly become one of the most attended events in our industry, and for good reason: we want to learn about the technologies that are shaping the future of our work. This year in San Diego, Buoyant had the privilege of hosting the Linkerd in Production workshop with our partner Digital Ocean. It was so much fun to share what we’ve learned about service mesh concepts with new and existing community members at the workshop, and provide individuals and teams with an opportunity to deepen their knowledge of Linkerd.

Nov 18, 2019 | William Morgan

Announcing Dive

Today we’re thrilled to unveil the private beta of Dive, our SaaS “team control plane” for platform teams operating Kubernetes. Dive is built by the same team that created Linkerd. And just as Linkerd gives your infrastructure mission-critical reliability, security, and observability features, Dive gives your team the SRE superpowers they need to safely operate applications at scale. What kind of superpowers? Things like: An always-up-to-date service catalog, including where services are deployed, which versions are running, who deployed them.