Linkerd 2.14: Service Mesh Observability and Performance

Introduction

Linkerd 2.14, released on June 20, 2024, continues to advance lightweight service mesh capabilities with enhanced observability, improved performance, better policy enforcement, and expanded Gateway API support. This release makes Linkerd more powerful while maintaining its reputation for simplicity and low overhead.

Enhanced Observability

• Metrics expansion provides more detailed service-level metrics for traffic analysis.
• Distributed tracing improvements enable better correlation of requests across services.
• Service profiles enhancements provide better visibility into service behavior and performance.
• Dashboard improvements offer more intuitive visualization of service mesh metrics.

Performance Improvements

1. Latency reductions minimize the overhead of service mesh operations.
2. Throughput enhancements improve handling of high-traffic workloads.
3. Resource usage optimizations reduce CPU and memory consumption.
4. Connection pooling improvements enhance efficiency for service-to-service communication.

Policy Enforcement

• Server authorization provides fine-grained control over service-to-service communication.
• Network policy integration enables consistent policy enforcement across networking layers.
• mTLS improvements enhance security with better certificate management.
• Policy validation provides better feedback on policy configuration errors.

Gateway API Support

• HTTPRoute support enables Gateway API-based routing configuration.
• Traffic splitting provides sophisticated traffic management capabilities.
• Backend selection improvements enable better service selection and health checking.
• TLS support enables secure routing with automatic certificate management.

Getting Started

# Install Linkerd CLI
curl -sL https://run.linkerd.io/install-edge | sh

# Install Linkerd
linkerd install | kubectl apply -f -

# Install Viz extension for observability
linkerd viz install | kubectl apply -f -

Create a service with Linkerd injection:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: myapp
  annotations:
    linkerd.io/inject: enabled
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: myapp
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: myapp
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: app
        image: myapp:latest

Summary

Linkerd 2.14 maintains its position as the simplest and most efficient service mesh, providing teams with powerful capabilities without complexity.