About Linkerd
Linkerd is a service mesh for Kubernetes. It adds security, observability and reliability to your services without changes to your application code.
What it does
Linkerd adds a lightweight proxy alongside each workload and handles traffic between services. It can encrypt communication with mutual TLS, and it measures success rates, latency and request volume for every meshed workload. Latency-aware load balancing helps requests reach healthy instances. The control plane is kept small, and the project includes diagnostic tools for debugging traffic.
Key features
- Mutual TLS between services
- Success rate, latency and request metrics
- Latency-aware load balancing
- Works without changes to application code
- Diagnostic tools for traffic
Who it's for
Platform and SRE teams that run many services on Kubernetes and want consistent security and metrics. Teams who want a simpler mesh with fewer custom resources than some alternatives will find it a fit.
Pricing and good to know
Linkerd is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence and is free to use. The project is a CNCF graduated project and is written in Rust, according to its site. An enterprise offering is also available from the project. A service mesh adds moving parts to your cluster, so test an upgrade in a non-production cluster first.
Highlights
- Mutual TLS between services
- Success rate, latency and request metrics
- Latency-aware load balancing
- Works without changes to application code
- Diagnostic tools for debugging traffic
