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This week, the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference in New York invited us to work with a hardcore group of architects and engineers who are eager to learn about service mesh and how Linkerd fits into their infrastructure. This workshop follows hot on the heels of our ServiceMeshCon workshop last November, with Kubernetes administrators and enthusiasts from around the world.

More than 40 folks from around the world attended the 3.5 hour session and pounded keys with us to get hands-on experience deploying Linkerd to Kubernetes clusters, graciously provided by DigitalOcean. The DigitalOcean managed Kubernetes service “abstracts away” the details of configuring and managing a cluster, allowing attendees to focus on the details of running highly observable and secure applications on their clusters.

As you might expect at a conference for architects, the attendees were all well versed in the concepts of building and deploying distributed systems. We had the opportunity to build on this fundamental and focus on the benefits of using the Linkerd service mesh to collect telemetry and secure the traffic between the workloads that they are running on their Kubernetes clusters.

The really fun part about the workshop is that it was more than a simple instructional course. The session became a multi-directional dialog between all of us that answered the questions of “how”, “when”, and most importantly “why” to use a service mesh in a complex distributed application.

Wes Novack, a Systems Architect at Pluralsight said:

“This workshop broke down the components of Linkerd and the benefits of using a service mesh in an easy to understand way. The hands on component walked us through installing Linkerd on a Kubernetes cluster, which turned out to be surprisingly simple. We were able to apply our newly gained knowledge on how Linkerd works by annotating our demo applications. We used the built-in Linkerd features to analyze the service graph, we took a look at success rate metrics, and we analyzed traffic logs. I walked away with a much better understanding of the value proposition of Linkerd and its implementation.”

Moreover, I had the opportunity to learn about how folks are using Kubernetes and the unique characteristics of each environment in which companies have deployed their application architectures.

I’m really looking forward to the next opportunity for a workshop so that we can continue to learn together.