Linkerd 2.10: CNCF Graduation and Service Mesh Maturity

Introduction

Linkerd 2.10 — CNCF Graduation and Service Mesh Maturity — was released on July 20, 2021.

Edge and east-west traffic paths tend to be where reliability and security issues show up first — so small gateway and proxy changes can have outsized impact.

In this release: Linkerd 2.10 marks the service mesh’s CNCF graduation milestone, delivering production-ready features, improved performance, and enhanced security for Kubernetes workloads.

CNCF Graduation Milestone

• CNCF graduation recognizes Linkerd’s maturity, stability, and widespread adoption in production environments.
• Project governance improvements ensure long-term sustainability and community-driven development.
• Enterprise adoption demonstrates Linkerd’s readiness for mission-critical workloads.
• Ecosystem integration expands with better support for observability and security tools.

Performance & Resource Efficiency

1. Rust-based data plane (Linkerd2-proxy) continues to deliver exceptional performance with minimal resource overhead.
2. Memory optimizations reduce proxy memory footprint, enabling higher pod density per node.
3. CPU efficiency improvements reduce latency and improve throughput for service-to-service communication.
4. Connection pooling enhancements optimize resource usage for high-traffic scenarios.

Security Enhancements

• Automatic mTLS provides zero-trust security by default without configuration overhead.
• Certificate management improvements simplify TLS certificate rotation and lifecycle management.
• Policy enforcement enhancements provide better control over service-to-service communication.
• Vulnerability management improvements ensure timely security updates and patches.

Observability & Debugging

• Metrics expansion provides detailed service-level metrics for Prometheus integration.
• Distributed tracing improvements enable better correlation of requests across service boundaries.
• Service topology visualization provides real-time views of service communication patterns.
• Debugging tools enhancements simplify troubleshooting of service mesh issues.

Operational Improvements

• Installation simplifications make it easier to deploy and upgrade Linkerd.
• Multi-cluster support improvements enable better management of distributed service meshes.
• Documentation expansion includes comprehensive guides for common scenarios.
• Community growth demonstrates active development and adoption.

Getting Started

linkerd install | kubectl apply -f -
linkerd check
linkerd viz install | kubectl apply -f -

Inject Linkerd into a deployment:

kubectl get deployment my-app -o yaml | linkerd inject - | kubectl apply -f -

Summary

Linkerd 2.10 and its CNCF graduation demonstrate the project’s evolution from innovation to production maturity, providing teams with a reliable, performant service mesh solution.