Overview

Linkerd is a service mesh for Kubernetes and other frameworks. It makesrunning services easier and safer by giving you runtime debugging,observability, reliability, and security—all without requiring anychanges to your code.

For a brief introduction to the service mesh model, we recommend readingWhat’s a service mesh? And why do I needone?

Linkerd is fully open source, licensed under Apachev2, and is a CloudNative Computing Foundation incubating project. Linkerd isdeveloped in the open in the Linkerd GitHub organization.

Linkerd has three basic components: a UI, a data plane, and a controlplane. You run Linkerd by:

• Installing the CLI on your local system;
• Installing the control plane into your cluster;
• Adding your services to Linkerd’s data plane.Once a service is running with Linkerd, you can use Linkerd’sUI to inspect andmanipulate it.

You can get started in minutes!

How it works

Linkerd works by installing a set of ultralight, transparent proxies next toeach service instance. These proxies automatically handle all traffic to andfrom the service. Because they’re transparent, these proxies act as highlyinstrumented out-of-process network stacks, sending telemetry to, and receivingcontrol signals from, the control plane. This design allows Linkerd to measureand manipulate traffic to and from your service without introducing excessivelatency.

In order to be as small, lightweight, and safe as possible, Linkerd’s proxiesare written in Rust and specialized for Linkerd.You can learn more about the proxies in the Linkerd proxyrepo.

Versions and channels

Linkerd is currently published in several tracks:

• Linkerd 2.x stable releases
• Linkerd 2.x edge releases.
• Linkerd 1.x.

Next steps

Get started with Linkerd in minutes, or check out thearchitecture for more details on Linkerd’scomponents and how they all fit together.