Writing Service Mesh Control Planes in Rust

In this session, Linkerd maintainer Eliza Weisman will discuss the Linkerd team's experience using Rust, why they chose it for their data plane, and, most recently, how Linkerd has extended the use of Rust into the control plane as well. The Rust programming language has rapidly grown in popularity. It offers several features that help write reliable, fault-tolerant, and efficient software — all desirable properties for a Kubernetes controller. 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. However, like much of the Kubernetes ecosystem, the Linkerd control plane — which manages the behavior of the data plane — has generally been implemented in Go. Linkerd 2.11 introduced the new policy controller, Linkerd's first control plane component implemented in Rust. Join this session as Eliza shares the team's challenges, benefits, and lessons learned using the Rust.