Linkerd Community Guide to KubeCon + Linkerd Day EU 2023

Linkerd Community Guide to KubeCon + Linkerd Day EU 2023

Catherine Paganini

Mar 14, 2023

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2023 is around the corner and, as usual, there is a ton of amazing Linkerd content. New this year is the introduction of Linkerd Day. The event will be held as a day zero conference at KubeCon EU in Amsterdam and is the only co-located event that is 100% vendor-talk-free! Be sure to add all these delightful nuggets of Linkerd goodness to your schedule today.

Just as last year, Buoyant will have a booth in the expo hall, and Linkerd will have a kiosk in the Project Pavilion. And if that’s still not enough, we’ll be at KubeCrash on March 29 and 30. Read on for the details!

KubeCrash, the Amsterdam KubeCon Warm-up (virtual)

On March 29 and 30, we'll be co-hosting KubeCrash, a virtual, free conference focused 100% on open source crash courses. This time around, we changed things up and will focus on two themes. Zero Trust Day will center on what an entire application looks like when designed with zero trust. And Innovation Day will look at gaming, ML/AI, and other ground-breaking technologies that are shaping the ecosystem right now. 

Speakers include Solomon Hykes, Founder of Docker, Ricardo Torres, Boeing, Chris Voss from Xbox, Frederick Kautz, KubeCon co-chair, Taylor Dolezal, CNCF, and many more! To learn more about the event, check out this blog post. We hope to see you there!

KubeCon (in-person)

KubeCon Europe will be happening live in Amsterdam, Netherlands, from April 18 - 21. In addition to KubeCon, there will also be lots of great end-user focused sessions at the first ever Linkerd Day.

Meet the maintainers in person!

You’ll be able to find Linkerd maintainers at the Linkerd booth in the CNCF Project Pavilion, as well as the Buoyant booth (S69). Both are located in the sponsor expo hall. Swing by for a live conversation with the people behind your favorite service mesh!

Featured Talks

Here's our pick for Linkerd-related talks and workshops at KubeCon and Linkerd Day. Be sure to add your favorites to your schedule.

Linkerd Day, Tuesday, April 18

Zero-Cost Linkerd at Adidas: Impossible Is Nothing. Daniel Baeyens, Miguel Allende, Adidas AG. Adopting any open-source project comes with a cost – but that doesn’t mean that a vendor offering is the best way to reduce that cost! It’s definitely possible to run pure open-source projects while keeping a small operational footprint, even when you also contribute upstream to help the community. In this talk, Adidas engineers Daniel Baeyens and Miguel Allende, will share how their team of just five people integrated Linkerd into their stack within timeframe. Read more and add this talk to your schedule.

Cost-Efficient Multi-Cluster Monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana & Linkerd. Carolin Dohmen, BWI. Finding the right observability solution can be tough, especially in the context of diverse multi-cluster or even multi-cloud ecosystems. Cloud native monitoring tools like Prometheus provide a good foundation for a unified observability stack across clusters. But how do you stay on top of cluster and application metrics from a variety of source clusters? And what about secure data transfer, high egress costs, and expensive data redundancy?  Read more and add this talk to your schedule.

Securing 1/3 of Norway's Annual State Budget. Hans Kristian Flaatten, Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV). The Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV) manages one third of Norway's annual state budget through it's various welfare schemes. When NAV moved out of their on-premises datacenters and onto public cloud in 2020 it was clear that we needed a new approach to security - an approach where we did not assume trust just because you had network access. This was not an easy task. Today NAV has 150 cross-functional product teams over 1600 individual application running in production on our Kubernetes. Read more and add this talk to your schedule.

From Zero to Prod in 2 Months with a Team of One. María Teresa Rojas Illanes, Pento. In this talk, Maria Rojas, platform engineer at Pento, will share why this automated payroll company needed a service mesh that gets the job done without adding complexity (their small team just couldn't afford to throw a lot of resources at the problem). When the engineering team was tasked with breaking up a monolith, they got one specific request: provide platform-related features (e.g., security, observability, and reliability) at the infrastructure level and avoid implementation at the application layer. Read more and add this talk to your schedule.

The Negatives to a Per-Host Service Mesh, the Sidecar Model Being a More Ideal Solution for Providing a More Robust Security Boundary. Chad Crowell, Raft. In our quest to improve the security of our service mesh, eBPF seems like a logical solution. In particular, a per-host proxy which would eliminate the need for a sidecar as a part of our service mesh implementation. But, there are security implications that we need to consider which would leave us more vulnerable if this decision was carelessly made. The sidecar proxy is actually an integral part of providing a reliable and scalable service, whilst providing necessary security constraints. Read more and add this talk to your schedule

How a Global Logistics Company Migrated Clouds with Zero Downtime. Björn Wenzel, Schenker AG. During this session, Björn Wenzel, Head of DevOps Platform at a Germany-based global logistics company, will share how they migrated mutiple microservices from one cloud to another. Switching clouds never comes without challenges, especially considering their workloads communicate via synchronous and asynchronous HTTP(S) and Kafka requests across clusters and clouds. Björn will cover how the platform team implemented a migration factory for migrating workloads from one AWS Account and network to another AWS Account and network while ensuring there was no service disruption or compromised workloads. Read more and add this talk to your schedule. 

Increasing Platform Reliability and Performance in One Week with a Service Mesh. Eli Goldberg, Salt Security. Platform engineer Eli will share how they used Linkerd to load balance gRPC connections while realizing instant security, efficiency, and performance gains in just one week. When the company's customer base started to grow quickly, the platform needed to scale fast. That led to a few challenges, including backward compatibility issues. To address that, the team moved to gRPC, but load balancing of gRPC requests isn't supported by Kubernetes. After some research, they decided to adopt a service mesh and gave Linkerd a try. Read more and add this talk to your schedule

Lack of Features Is a Feature for This German Automaker. Dominik Táskai, LeanNet Ltd. During his session, Dominik Táskai, Junior DevOps Engineer at LeanNet, will make a case for how sometimes a lack of features is itself a feature: a technology focused on doing just a few things really, really well can often help us reach our goals faster than something that tries to do too much. That's the lesson he took away from implementing Linkerd at a major German automaker within just five weeks. A journey from no mesh to trying and failing with more complex ones and then finally successfully installing Linkerd in production. Read more and add this talk to your schedule

KubeCon, Wednesday, April 19

Life Without Sidecars - Is eBPF's Promise Too Good to Be True?. Zahari Dichev, Buoyant. The recent popularity of eBPF has triggered a number of discussions of whether this technology will revolutionize the service mesh space. The promise of all the benefits that a service mesh can bring to your cloud-native infrastructure at a fraction of the performance and operational cost seems tantalizing. eBPF is said to be the tool that can help us build a native and highly efficient service mesh implementation and free us from the sidecar model. Could this all be true? Read more and add this talk to your schedule

KubeCon, Thursday, April 20

Overview and state of Linkerd. Matei David, Buoyant. In this talk, maintainers from the Linkerd project will present an overview of the project and an update on upcoming releases. They’ll cover 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 in one of the CNCF’s most talked-about projects. This talk will cover Linkerd's recent 2.13 release, which introduced circuit breaking and header-based routing, as well as the upcoming 2.14 release which adds ingress support. Read more and add this talk to your schedule

Would you like to take to the KubeCon stage?

Do you have a Linkerd story you'd like to share at the next KubeCon or Linkerd Day, but aren't sure how to take the plunge? We'd be thrilled to help you get started. Sign up for the Linkerd Community Anchor Program and some very friendly people will give you hands-on help in telling your story.

Connect with us outside of KubeCon

If you can't make it to KubeCon this year, don't worry. You can always find us in the Linkerd Slack channel — hop in and say hi!

Whether in person or virtually, we hope to see you at KubeCon EU in Amsterdam! 

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