KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2024 is around the corner, and with it, lots of Linkerd goodness. Look forward to eight Linkerd talks (!), and come find us at the Linkerd kiosk in the Project Pavilion. This year, KubeCon Europe will be live in beautiful Paris — the city of love and Kubernetes (at least on March 19 - 22). It's always great to meet new users and see old friends! 

Meet the maintainers in person

As usual, you'll find Linkerd maintainers at the Linkerd kiosk in the CNCF Project Pavilion. Swing by for a conversation with the team behind your favorite service mesh!

Linkerd talks: Mark your calendars

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

Tuesday, March 19

ArgoCon: Argo Vs Flagger: Progressive Delivery with Linkerd. Scott Rigby, Kostis Kapelonis, Anastasiia Gubska

If you’re looking into cloud native Progressive Delivery, you are likely considering Argo Rollouts or Flagger. Part of popular graduated CNCF projects – Argo and Flux, respectively – both tie seamlessly into GitOps. Both support advanced Continuous Delivery techniques such as Canary Releases, A/B Testing, and Blue/Green deployment. Both provide extended functionality with a Service Mesh such as Linkerd.

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Lightning Talk: Rust-Based Magic: Streamlined and Secure. Christian Hüning, Lead System Architect SL Cloud, BWI GmbH

Read about Rust, and you hear claims that seem too good to be true: memory safety, zero-cost abstractions, blazing speed…all at the same time? Back in 2018, the Linkerd project chose Rust for its data plane, betting that the language really would deliver the kind of speed and security that handling user data required.

Wednesday, March 20

Linkerd Project Update: VM Support, Ingress, Security on the Edge, and Rust. Matei David, Buoyant 

In this project update by Linkerd maintainer Matei David, you'll learn about exciting new developments in the fast-paced world of Linkerd, the world's fastest, lightest service mesh. We'll discuss our adoption of Rust, the newly-added "mesh expansion" support for running Linkerd's dataplane outside of Kubernetes, how we've been tackling edge deployments (especially around security), and our upcoming plans for handling ingress traffic. Read more and add this talk to your schedule. 

Thursday, March 21

Tutorial: Configuring Your Service Mesh with Gateway API. Mike Morris, Microsoft & Flynn, Buoyant

Gateway API v1.0 is here! But... what does that mean? How do we actually use it? Does it even work? Can we get real, useful things done with Gateway API? Let’s find out! Join Gateway API and GAMMA contributors for a hands-on workshop using either Linkerd or Istio to get things done using Gateway API!

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Kubernetes Controllers in Rust: Fast, Safe, Sane. Matei David, Buoyant 

The Rust programming language was built to create reliable, fault-tolerant, and efficient software. These are all desirable properties for a Kubernetes controller! But it’s only been in the last couple of years that projects like kube-rs and kubert have provided Rustaceans with truly viable alternatives to writing controllers in Go using client-go. Linkerd, the graduated CNCF service mesh, has been using Rust for its data plane proxies since the release of Linkerd 2 in 2018: the data plane has to be as fast and secure as possible, so Rust was a natural choice.

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The Rustvolution: How Rust Is the Future of Cloud Native. Flynn, Buoyant

For the last several years, Go and Kubernetes have been all but inseparable. This monoculture approach has brought some tremendous benefits to the cloud-native ecosystem, fueling the growth of companies moving to cloud native through Go's extensive set of widely-available common tools and the wide base of talent it provided.

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Bringing SPIFFE to Linkerd for Mesh Expansion. Zahari Dichev, Buoyant 

Identity lies at the core of every service mesh, so changing what “identity” means is always a challenging endeavor that mustn’t be taken lightly. Yet that’s exactly what the Linkerd project had to do to support extending the mesh beyond Kubernetes. Ultimately, communicating beyond the cluster isn’t hard, and identity is where the magic happens. How exactly does the mesh identify foreign workloads? What’s the role of Kubernetes itself in this realm? What mechanisms can we use outside of Kubernetes?

Friday, March 22

Keynote: CNCF Graduated Project Updates. William Morgan and Linky, Buoyant 

Don't miss the Linkerd project update during the keynote for a fun video starring Linky, the Linkerd mascot, and William Morgan, CEO at Buoyant.

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Sidecar Containers in Kubernetes: Past, Present, and Future. William Morgan, Buoyant & Mike Beaumont, Kong

The concept of the sidecar container has been a part of the Kubernetes landscape since 2015, but surprisingly, Kubernetes itself had no built-in concept of sidecars until Kubernetes 1.28. But what does this new feature actually provide? In this talk, we take a comprehensive look at sidecar containers as they stand today. We outline the long journey of the infamous KEP-753, which proposed a sidecar mode for containers in 2019 but took four long years to land, spawning countless memes along the way.

Can you see yourself on the KubeCon stage?

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 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!