Linkerd 2.18 is here, focusing once again on improvements around operational simplicity! In this Service Mesh Academy, we'll take the whirlwind tour of the highlights in this new release.
Our first headline feature is protocol declarations, which allow users to explicitly define which protocol a given workload uses in order to help Linkerd eliminate unexpected behavior under extreme cluster load. Linkerd 2.18 also introduces preliminary Windows support (a long-requested feature for enterprise users with diverse workloads) and makes it easier for Linkerd to interoperate with other projects that use Gateway API, by further decoupling Linkerd from CRD management for Gateway API. Of course Linkerd 2.18 also has a host of smaller features and bugfixes, and we’ll hit the high notes there too.
Join us for this hands-on workshop as we dive into these features, explore how they improve operational simplicity, and help you get the most out of Linkerd 2.18!
This is a hands-on workshop, so it's important that you arrive prepared with a Kubernetes cluster (pretty much any kind will do!) and the Linkerd CLI installed on your machine! We'll use BEL 2.17, but edge releases starting with edge-25.2.1 will work just fine, too. Check out the BEL Getting Started Guide for specific instructions on how to set that up. (If you don't want to do the hands-on portion, you are welcome to just listen in. But it won't be as fun!)
Flynn
Flynn is a tech evangelist at Buoyant, where he works on spreading the good word about Linkerd — the graduated CNCF service mesh that makes the fundamental tools for software security and reliability freely available to every engineer — and about Kubernetes and cloud-native development in general. Flynn is also the original author and a maintainer of the Emissary-ingress API gateway, also a CNCF project. Flynn's career in computing spans nearly forty years and runs the gamut from bringup on bare metal to distributed applications, with a common thread of communications and security throughout. He has spoken about Linkerd, Emissary-ingress, and other cloud native technologies at several conferences, including KubeCon/CloudNativeCon, DevOps Days, and the NYC Kubernetes meetup.
Copyright © 2025 Buoyant Inc.
