Overview and State of Linkerd

Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

2023-04-20

Authors: Matei David

Summary

Linkerd is a service mesh for cloud-native microservices that provides failure resiliency, observability, and security.

The Gateway API standardizes some of the Ingress stuff and is mostly for North-South traffic.
Linkerd is working on adapting the HTTP route resources to make sense for East-West traffic.
If all pods start returning 500 errors all at once, they will all be taken out of circulation and apply the back-off penalty.
Linkerd does not yet support IPv6, but it is in the books.
EBPF is a cool technology, but it cannot do any State Management inside of it, making it difficult to handle circuit breaking, retries, and timeouts.
Linkerd supports EBPF, but when it comes to doing service mesh things, there is no substitute for the sidecar proxy.

The presenter mentioned that if all pods start returning 500 errors all at once, they will all be taken out of circulation and apply the back-off penalty. If one of them comes back on, they will probe it, and if it works, they will start routing requests to it. Otherwise, tough luck.

Abstract

In this talk, maintainers from the Linkerd project will present an overview of the project and an update on upcoming releases. They’ll cover what Linkerd is and how it compares to other service meshes; what the latest features and functionality are; what to expect in upcoming releases; and how you can get involved in one of the CNCF’s most talked-about projects. This talk will cover Linkerd's recent 2.13 release, which introduced circuit breaking and header-based routing, as well as the upcoming 2.14 release which adds ingress support.

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