Changing Service Mesh: How NAV swapped Istio with Linkerd with hardly any downtime

In 2021, Norway’s Labour & Welfare Administration, known simply as NAV, decided to replace Istio entirely with Linkerd in their stack. They listed several reasons, including the complexity resulting from all the features they didn't need but were part of the service mesh.

So, and after yet another “Oh… This problem was caused by Istio!”-moment, we decided the time was ripe to consider the alternatives out there.

All NAV really cared about was mTLS and authorization policies, so they set out to look for alternatives and found Linkerd.… Read the full blog post here.

Hans Kristian Flaatten, SRE at NAV, also spoke at Linkerd Day EU 2023 to share how they secure a third of Norway's annual state budget with Linkerd. Check out his talk today!