Getting started

Last update: August 31, 2023 / Linkerd 2.14.0

We’re thrilled that you’re taking Linkerd to production. Today, organizations around the globe rely on Linkerd for their mission-critical systems—including Buoyant itself. You’ll be in great company.

Linkerd is designed to be boring. We chose the simplest operational model with the clearest failure and security boundaries (the sidecar). That said, operating any software in production is not a trivial task—especially in a fast-moving environment where nothing stays still for long.

The goal of this guide is to provide concrete, practical advice for deploying and operating Linkerd in production environments. We’ve written this document based on our experience helping organizations large and small adopt Linkerd, as well as our experience running Linkerd ourselves.

This runbook is meant to be used in conjunction with the official Linkerd docs. While this guide will give you our advice for getting to (and staying in!) production, the docs themselves contain the majority of the information you’ll actually need to understand to be successful with Linkerd, and whenever possible, we’ll point to the relevant docs section from this guide.

Please read the important Disclaimer section. We do our best to ensure this doc is accurate, but mistakes, omissions, and inaccuracies do happen. Ultimately, you are responsible for your production systems, not us. (But if you do find an error in the guide, by all means please tell us!)

Let’s get started!