KubeCon has quickly become one of the most attended events in our industry, and for good reason: we want to learn about the technologies that are shaping the future of our work. This year in San Diego, Buoyant had the privilege of hosting the Linkerd in Production workshop with our partner Digital Ocean.

It was so much fun to share what we’ve learned about service mesh concepts with new and existing community members at the workshop, and provide individuals and teams with an opportunity to deepen their knowledge of Linkerd. This workshop was first offered at KubeCon Europe 2019 in Barcelona and the curriculum of the workshop has evolved with versions of Linkerd 2.5 and 2.6 which were released between the KubeCon Europe and North America events.

In Barcelona, the workshop covered topics including service mesh concepts, automatic proxy injection, enabling mutual TLS traffic between services by default, metrics collection and analysis, and techniques for debugging services using Linkerd. Linkerd 2.5 and 2.6 added support for traffic splitting and distributed tracing, respectively, so the curriculum for the workshop in San Diego included new modules for using these features in a production environment!

The workshop started off by explaining the control plane and data plane of the service mesh architecture. This information set the foundation for the next section of the workshop which covered core service mesh concepts: observability, reliability, security, and traffic management.

Exercises during the hands-on portion of the workshop made these concepts concrete when students installed Linkerd and injected the proxies into the pods of an example application. From this point on, the workshop went into detail about how to use the Linkerd dashboard and CLI to view metrics of network traffic, debug the example application, implement distributed tracing, and traffic splitting for canary and blue/green deployments.

Attendee Jeff Puccinelli of Mulligan Funding said:

“We had deployed and configured Linkerd in development with the guidance of the community members as questions came up. When I realized that Linkerd was offering a hands on workshop at this year’s KubeCon, I signed up as I was eager to further understand the application architecture and functionality. It was a great opportunity to work directly with the community and meet them in person.”

The feeling is mutual Jeff!

Stay tuned to the blog to get updates about future offerings of this workshop!

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