We're happy to announce the release of Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd 2.15.3. This latest stable release includes several backported bug fixes, especially around native sidecars, as well as usability improvements and new diagnostic and configuration features.

Hot on the heels of a recent third-party benchmark that once again showed Linkerd outperforming Istio and Cilium, BEL 2.15.3 is our third stable release in the Linkerd 2.15 line. Like every BEL release, it has undergone rigorous production testing across a variety of platforms including EKS, AKS, GKE, and OpenShift, as well as running in production at Buoyant itself.

You can read the full 2.15.3 release notes on our docs site, or just download BEL 2.15.3 today and give it a try!

Improved support for native sidecars

The 2.15.3 release contains several Linkerd bugfixes related to Kubernetes's native sidecar feature. Native sidecars, which recently graduated to beta status in Kubernetes 1.29, remove some of the long-standing warts around sidecar usage in Kubernetes, especially for Job workloads. Over the past few months this feature has seen a surge in adoption in the Linkerd community, which has been immensely helpful for fleshing out the corner cases in native sidecar usage across a variety of environments.

Bugfixes and CVE remediations

In addition to native sidecar fixes, the 2.15.3 release also backports several other recent bugfixes in Linkerd’s multicluster service mirror and policy controller, including:

• A fix to the HTTPRoutes CRD to include a port field in the route status parent ref (backported from linkerd2#12454)
• A fix for a panic in the multicluster service mirror controller (backported from linkerd2#12406)
• A fix to avoid unnecessary headless endpoint mirrors cleanups (backported from linkerd2#12500)

This release also remediates two non-critical CVEs in underlying dependencies in Linkerd, including  CVE-2024-32650  and CVE-2024-2961. (Neither of these CVEs represent a realistic security issue for Linkerd users, so these updates are for hygiene and compliance.)

Tested platforms

As always, BEL 2.15.3 has undergone a rigorous set of production testing across a variety of Kubernetes versions, including:

• EKS 1.27, 1.28, and 1.29, including ARM
• GKE 1.27, and 1.28
• AKS 1.27, 1.28.3, 1.28.5
• Red Hat OpenShift (OKD 4.13.0)

See the current list of tested platforms for more details.

Try Linkerd today!

A recent evaluation by cloud native consulting company LiveWyre showed that Linkerd outperformed both Istio and Cilium. This is the latest in a long line of benchmarks that consistently show Linkerd is fastest, lightest service mesh on the market.

BEL is our production-ready distribution of the Linkerd service mesh, and the distribution of Linkerd that we run ourselves in production. Anyone can download and try BEL. Just start here and get meshing!

What’s next for Linkerd?

As the creators and maintainers of Linkerd, we're happy to report that the pace of Linkerd development is faster than ever. Over the next few months, we'll be shipping improvements to mesh expansion ergonomics, adding support for IPv6, bringing parity to our Gateway API and pre-Gateway API featureset, and tackling big features like egress metrics and control. Stay tuned for lots, lots more great features from team Linkerd, coming soon to a BEL release near you.

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