The Linkerd team has been hard at work, as always, culminating in the release of Linkerd 2.16! In this Service Mesh Academy, we’ll take a whirlwind tour of all the highlights of this new release.
Linkerd 2.16 starts by adding support for IPv6 and dual-stack clusters, as you may have seen in earlier edge releases, and continues with support for the Gateway API GRPCRoute resource! It also now supports configuring timeouts and retries via annotations on HTTPRoute, GRPCRoute, and their parent Services. Last but not least, for major new features, Linkerd 2.16 introduces an audit mode for authorization policy, allowing you to see what would happen with a policy change before you apply it. And, of course, there’s more: Linkerd 2.16 has a host of smaller features and bugfixes, and we’ll hit the high notes there, too.
This is a hands-on workshop, so it’s important that you arrive prepared with a Kubernetes cluster and the Linkerd CLI installed on your machine! I'll be using Linkerd enterprise-2.16.0 since this is all about 2.16 — 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 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.