Service meshes are here — in production, and solving real-world problems! This year, KubeCon NA 2020 and the co-located ServiceMeshCon moved away from previous discussions about choosing a service mesh to focus on real-world implementation stories — a clear reflection of the momentum of the service mesh and Linkerd in particular.

Let’s look at some of the highlights of this year’s event.

Tribute to Dan Kohn

We saw many tributes to Dan Kohn, the CNCF’s former Executive Director, who recently passed away. The cloud native ecosystem, including Linkerd, wouldn’t be where it is today without his vision and dedication. The tributes made it clear, Dan influenced many people and it was moving to see how genuinely touched everyone was. Check out this GitHub repo with memorialsdedicated to Dan to find out how he impacted different individuals from the community.

More Power, Less Pain: Building an Internal Platform with CNCF Tools

In his keynote, GoSpotCheck’s David Sudia shared how his team combined Linkerd with Helm, Prometheus, Kubernetes, and other CNCF projects to build a platform that their developers actually love and want to use. It’s easy to introduce new technology and entirely ignore what it takes to use that tech each day. David showed how Linkerd and other CNCF projects have come together to make Kubernetes a tool that his organization looks forward to using.

Multi-Cluster is Easier than you Think with Linkerd and Ambassador

Linkerd and Ambassador Labs teamed up to prove to the world that multi-cluster deployments don’t have to be hard—not if you’re using Linkerd and Ambassador! Thomas Rampelberg walked through the fundamentals of what it takes to get two Kubernetes clusters talking to each other. He also talked about tradeoffs and showed how Linkerd implemented this functionality. Daniel Bryant weaved a demo through these explanations and got a fully working multi-cluster solution with Ambassador handling ingress, all by the end of the talk!

Overview and State of Linkerd

Interested in what’s been happening with Linkerd this year? Perhaps you’d like a primer on how we got where we are today! William Morgan shared what’s been happening and how we got here. Tarun Pothulapati followed up with what you can expect from Linkerd in the coming year. The project is going to make some massive strides around functionality in 2021 and getting a glimpse into the roadmap is a must if you’re interested in Linkerd!

How H-E-B Curbside Adopted Linkerd During a Pandemic

H-E-B’s Justin Turner and Garrett Griffin discussed how they are leveraging Linkerd to safely deliver groceries to their customers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seeing Linkerd in action in such a critical use case was inspiring to our contributors. In fact, one of our favorite quotes came out of this talk: “Linkerd is suspiciously easy to get up and running.” Having a reliable platform that you can trust is critical during interesting times. Linkerd was just what the H-E-B team needed to get the job done and they did a fantastic job of explaining Linkerd’s benefits.

In addition to the talks, we had our largest attended KubeCon office hours and answered questions ranging from how to get an organization to adopt Linkerd to highly technical conversations about how the Linkerd proxy works internally.

Getting to Grips with a Virtual KubeCon

KubeCon, NA 2020 was the second virtual event of its kind and KubeCon, NA 2020 really started to come into its own. One of the most treasured parts of KubeCon has always been the hallway conversations! Meeting new folks in the cloud native space, catching up with old friends and learning what’s happening in the ecosystem. A slack channel and associated video calls did a great job of providing that unplanned, social connection. This really ended up feeling like a community event, ranging from impromptu cooking demos to career advice and tips for getting the most out of Kubernetes.

More to Come

We hope you enjoyed this latest KubeCon as much as we did and be sure to participate in KubeCon EU 2021. We love meeting the community and helping you navigate Linkerd and everything associated with it.

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