KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2021 Virtual is just around the corner with an absolutely stellar lineup of Linkerd content from around the globe. This might be the most Linkerd-heavy KubeCon yet—a clear indication of the tremendous momentum behind Linkerd. As always, there are tons of user stories about Linkerd adoption, and even a keynote on how Linkerd has helped organizations address the COVID-19 pandemic.

Maintainer office hours and project booth

Now’s your chance to ask the Linkerd maintainers anything! We’ll be hosting project office hours via Zoom on Wednesday, May 5 at 16:00 - 17:00 CEST and Friday, May 7 at 13:30 - 14:30 CEST.

The Linkerd maintainers will also be hanging out at the Linkerd booth in the project pavilion, located inside the sponsor expo hall. Come join us for a live conversation with the maintainers of your favorite service mesh.

Featured KubeCon, Cloud Native Rust Day and ServiceMeshCon Talks

Here’s our pick for the Linkerd-related talks at KubeCon, Cloud Native Rust Day and ServiceMeshCon.

Monday, May 3

Why the future of the cloud will be built on Rust. 11:15 - 11:45 CEST, Oliver Gould, Buoyant.

Linkerd was the first CNCF project to incorporate Rust and a major driver of the early Rust networking ecosystem. Oliver, creator of Linkerd, will describe why he thinks the the future of cloud software and the cloud native ecosystem will be tied to the Rust programming language.

Panel Discussion: Rust in the Cloud. 14:45 - 15:25 CEST, Paul Howard, Arm, William Morgan, Buoyant, Oliver Gould, Buoyant, Ashley Williams, Rust Foundation, and Carl Lerche, Amazon.

In this panel, you’ll hear from experts from several areas in the intersection of the Rust and Cloud Native communities who’ll discuss what’s next for the Rust in the cloud.

Tuesday, May 4

Scheduling 68k COVID Tests with Linkerd. 10:30 - 11:00 CEST, Dom DePasquale, DevOps Architect, and Shawn Smith, Director of Software Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University.

During this session, Dom will share how his team at Penn State was tasked with building a system for scheduling the testing of students, faculty, and staff for their arrival back to campus in the fall during the summer of 2020.

Rapid Experimentation Simplified with Linkerd. 13:15 - 13:45 CEST, Alexander Simon Jones, Principal Engineer, Civo.

In this talk, Alex shares how he leveraged Linkerd to introduce rapid experimentation at a multinational financial services firm, enabling them to create more resilient services and easily test changes.

Lightning Talk Adding FIPS-140 Support to a Service Mesh. 14:45 - 14:55 CEST, Arnar Pall Arnarsson, Senior Software Engineer, NetApp Inc.

In this lightning talk, Arnar describes the challenge of adding support for FIPS-140 compliance to Linkerd and how it allows users to benefit from the mesh’s critical observability, reliability, as well as satisfying the strict security requirements.

Tap Tap, Debugging an App with your Service Mesh. 15:05 - 15:35 CEST, Jason Morgan, Buoyant.

Buoyant technical evangelist Jason Morgan describes why microservices are great for all kinds of reasons, but troubleshooting issues in a distributed system is rarely easy. Issues often turn into a blame game where DNS, Kubernetes, the network, or the mesh all take a turn. With Linkerd’s built in ability to tap into, and analyze traffic we can quickly identify and isolate problems.

Creating Chaos in the University with Linkerd and Chaos Mesh. 15:40 - 16:10 CEST, Jossie Bismarck Castrillo Fajardo & Sergio Arnaldo Méndez Aguilar, Universidad San Carlos de Guatemala.

A guide to creating chaos engineering experiments using the technical approach and advantages of service meshes. This talk will also describe how to use and interpret collected data from Linkerd during a chaos experiment, and how Linkerd can complement Chaos Mesh for other types of chaos experiments.

Panel: The State Of Service Mesh. 16:15 - 16:55 CEST, William Morgan, Buoyant, Idit Levine, Solo.io, Nic Jackson, Hashicorp, Marco Palladino, Kong Inc & Louis Ryan, Google, Moderated by: Lin Sun, Solo.io.

Do you need a service mesh? Is service mesh getting easier? What is the current state of the service mesh ecosystem? Join this live interactive session with a panel of service mesh experts from various projects.

Wednesday, May 5

Compliance the Easy Way: Zero-conf mTLS for Dev and smooth Day-2 for Ops. 13:10 - 13:45 CEST, Christian Hüning & Lutz Behnke, finleap connect.

Operating in the financial industry with highly regulated requirements, Finleap Connect’s Christian Hüning and Lutz Behnke will review the decision making process that led to selecting Linkerd for the task of securing traffic for the Finleap application infrastructure.

Seamless multi-cluster Communication and Observability with Linkerd. 15:05 - 15:40 CEST, Max Körbächer, Liquid Reply.

Considering migrating a traditional cross-cluster app containing sensitive data to a meshed microservices-based application? In this session, Max will discuss how his team migrated an app with GDPR protected data to a Kubernetes-based architecture meshed with Linkerd.

Thursday, May 6

Keynote: Linkerd vs COVID-19: Addressing the global Pandemic with a Service Mesh. 10:22 - 10:37 CEST, William Morgan, Buoyant, Inc.

William will provide an overview of the various ways in which the Linkerd service mesh has been used to address the global COVID-19 pandemic in practice, ranging from test scheduling for college students to locating available vaccine sources, to the rollout of curbside delivery features at a major grocery chain.

Overview and State of Linkerd. 13:30 - 14:05 CEST, William Morgan & Matei David, Buoyant, Inc.

Linkerd people William and Matei will share what’s been going on with Linkerd over the past year and what you can expect from Linkerd in the upcoming year!

Want to get involved?

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

And 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!

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