Linkerd

Linkerd, developed by Buoyant, is a service mesh that enhances the observability, reliability, and security of Kubernetes applications without requiring any code modifications. According to the vendor, Linkerd is suitable for companies of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. It is utilized by DevOps engineers, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), Cloud Architects, Kubernetes Administrators, and Software Developers across various industries, including technology, finance, e-commerce, healthcare, and telecommunications.

Key Features

According to the vendor, Linkerd offers the following key features:

Instant platform health metrics: Linkerd provides real-time visibility into the health of your platform by tracking success rates, latencies, and request volumes for every meshed workload. This information is readily available without any changes or configurations to your applications.

Simplified configuration: Linkerd has a minimalist, Kubernetes-native design that aims to simplify the configuration process by reducing the need for extensive YAML and custom resource definitions (CRDs).

Automatic mutual TLS and zero-trust security: Linkerd seamlessly adds mutual TLS (Transport Layer Security) to on-cluster TCP communication without manual configuration. It enables zero-trust security policies by default, ensuring secure communication between services.

Engineer-centric design: Linkerd is designed with engineers in mind, offering a self-contained control plane that can be incrementally deployed. It also provides a lightweight data plane written in Rust, a memory-safe language, for improved security and performance. Additionally, Linkerd offers extensive diagnostics and debugging tools for troubleshooting.

Latency-aware load balancing and cross-cluster failover: Linkerd enables intelligent load balancing based on latency metrics, automatic request retries, timeouts, and blue-green deployments to enhance application resilience. It also supports cross-cluster failover for high availability.

Rust-based ultralight data plane: Linkerd's data plane, called Linkerd2-proxy, is an ultralight micro-proxy written in Rust. This choice of language ensures high performance and security, preventing common programming errors such as buffer overflows and memory leaks.