The document discusses Linkerd, an open-source service mesh designed to improve traffic management in microservices through enhanced visibility, reliability, and security. It highlights its features, architecture, and community engagement, along with the history of its development. Additionally, it presents the future roadmap for service mesh enhancements and emphasizes the importance of a simplified user experience.

1. The Service Mesh
It’s About the Traffic
Oliver Gould @olix0r

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https://www.infoq.com/presentations/
linkerd-cloud-native/

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4. Oliver
Gould Photo Goes Here
Linkerd Lead; Buoyant CTO
@olix0r
@olix0r
@olix0r

5. Nov 9, 2016
QConSF

6. Agenda
Why Does Linkerd Exist?��
The Trough of Service Mesh Disillusionment��♂
It’s All About the Traffic!��

8. 2/2016 1/2017 9/20182013

9. Control Plane
● Discovery
○ ZooKeeper
● Telemetry
○ Zipkin
○ Viz...
Timelines
Finagle
(Library)
Users
Finagle
(Library)

12. Service Mesh
A
C
B

13. Service Mesh: Data Plane
A
C
B
Proxy
Proxy
Proxy

14. Service Mesh: Control Plane
A
C
B
Proxy
Proxy
Proxy
Control Plane

15. An Abridged History of Linkerd
● 2016: Linkerd 0.1.0
● Twitter-style Operability for Microservices
● Scala (JVM) + Finagle
● Extremely Powerful and Configurable

16. An Abridged History of Linkerd
● JVM sidecar too heavy for some users
● Difficult to configure
○ High barrier to entry
○ Many different configurations to support

17. How?
💪 Zero-config “just works”: If you have a functioning K8s app, drop in Linkerd without
configuring anything.
💪 Fast and small: proxies should introduce the bare minimum perf and resource cost
💪 Understandable: no magic
Data plane: linkerd2-proxy. Written in Rust. <10MB RSS, <1ms p99. (!!!!)
Control plane: linkerd2. Written in Go. Includes small Prometheus
(6 hour window), Grafana, etc.

18. Linkerd 2.x architecture

20. Strong Typing

21. No GC: RAII
Resource Acquisition Is Initialization

22. What does Linkerd do?
👍 Visibility: Automatic golden metrics:
success rates, latencies, throughput
👍 Reliability: Load balancing, retries,
timeouts, circuit breaking, deadlines
👍 Security: Transparent mTLS, cert
validation, policy
Goal: Move visibility, reliability, and security
primitives into the infrastructure layer, out of
the application layer.

23. Linkerd: Observability
● Rich traffic metrics
○ Request rate, Success rate, latency
○ Across many dimensions
● Request inspection

24. Linkerd: Reliability
● Latency aware load balancing
● Retries
● Timeouts

25. Linkerd: Security
● Mutual, cryptographic identity
○ Bootstraps via Kubernetes ServiceAccounts
○ Transparent
○ On by default

26. An open source service mesh and
CNCF project.
🔥 24+ months in production
🔥 3,000+ Slack channel members
🔥 10,000+ GitHub stars
🔥 100+ contributors
🔥 Near-weekly edge releases

27. The Trough of Service Mesh
Disillusionment

28. Jeremykemp at English Wikipedia

29. What Can Go Wrong?
1. Can’t even get it working…
2. Trying to do too many things at once...
3. It’s always the mesh’s fault!

30. It’s All About the Traffic!

32. The Service Mesh Interface

34. Roadmap
As of 2.3:
🗺 Telemetry, retries, timeouts, auto-inject, mTLS on by default. All zero config.
2.4
🗺 Traffic shifting (blue-green, canaries), install split.
Mid term:
🗺 Policy, mesh expansion, distributed tracing, lots lots more.

36. F R O M Y O U R F R I E N D S A T
Join our community!
@linkerdgithub.com/linkerd slack.linkerd.io

37. Watch the video with slide
synchronization on InfoQ.com!
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/
linkerd-cloud-native/