Blog | Linkerd

Federating Clusters for Zero-Downtime Kubernetes

Dominik Táskai, Linkerd Ambassador — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every multi-region setup eventually meets the same awkward moment: a whole cluster goes away, and the identical copy of your service running two regions over might as well not exist, because nothing is wired to treat them as one thing. Failover becomes a runbook: restore, repoint DNS, and wait for an outage that, on paper, you’d already paid to survive.

Linkerd’s multicluster extension closes that gap by letting several clusters present a service as a single, load-balanced endpoint. The part that the official tasks gloss over is that a real platform almost never picks one multicluster mode. Some services want federation (same service everywhere, one endpoint, automatic failover). While others want mirroring (reach a specific remote service by name). And you frequently want both patterns living on the same set of links. The docs walk through each mode on its own. This post wires all three together across three GKE clusters, with a full-mesh link topology, a chaos test that takes out an entire cluster, and scripts you can clone and run on a fresh GCP project.

Announcing Linkerd 2.20: Rate-limit-aware load balancing, reduced memory usage, better inbound metrics, and more

William Morgan — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Linkerd 2.20 is now available! This release improves circuit breaking and load balancing to be aware of rate limit responses, significantly improves memory consumption of the control plane (especially on busy clusters), and improves Linkerd’s metrics suite for inbound traffic. This release also promotes native sidecars to the default deployment type for Linkerd’s data plane microproxies.

Linkerd has now seen almost a decade of continuous improvement and evolution. Our goal is to build a service mesh that our users can rely on for 100 years. Linkerd 2.20 is the fourth major version since the announcement of Buoyant’s profitability and Linkerd project sustainability, and continues our laser focus on operational simplicity: delivering the notoriously complex service mesh feature set in a way that is manageable, scalable, and performant.

The Proxy Died First: How Kubernetes Native Sidecars Solve the Service Mesh Shutdown Problem

Blake Romano, Linkerd Ambassador — Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve ever operated a service mesh on Kubernetes, you’ve probably seen something like this during a rolling deployment:

Unexpected error occurred: Client 'http://my-api:8080/': Connect Error:
Connection refused: my-api/100.20.100.200:8080

One second your pod is humming along, serving traffic, and talking to its upstream dependencies through the mesh. The next second it enters Terminating state, the sidecar proxy exits, and every in-flight request to a dependent service gets a cold Connection refused in response.

Deep Dive: How linkerd-destination works in the Linkerd Service Mesh

Bezaleel Silva, Linkerd Ambassador — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally published on Bezaleel Silva’s Medium blog.

Recently, in our daily operations, we took a deep dive into the inner workings of linkerd-destination, one of the most critical components of the Linkerd control plane.

The motivation was simple: as our cluster grew and traffic increased, the question shifted from “Does Linkerd work?” to “How exactly does it react when everything changes at once?”. Frequent deployments, production scaling, security policies being applied — and at the center of all this, the destination service.

Linkerd Protocol Detection

Nawaz Dhandala — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally published on the OneUptime blog. The cover photo is derived from an image by OpenClipart-Vectors.

Linkerd is a lightweight service mesh that provides observability, reliability, and security for Kubernetes applications. One of its powerful features is automatic protocol detection, which allows Linkerd to identify the protocol being used by incoming connections without requiring explicit configuration.

This automatic detection enables Linkerd to apply protocol-specific features like HTTP metrics, retries, and load balancing strategies without manual annotation of every service.

Linkerd Edge Release Roundup: December 2025

Flynn — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the excessively-large December 2025 Edge Release Roundup posts, where we dive into the most recent edge releases to help keep everyone up to date on the latest and greatest! This post covers edge releases from September through November 2025 (the runup to KubeCon was hectic around here).

How to give feedback

Edge releases are a snapshot of our current development work on main; by definition, they always have the most recent features but they may have incomplete features, features that end up getting rolled back later, or (like all software) even bugs. That said, edge releases are intended for production use, and go through a rigorous set of automated and manual tests before being released. Once released, we also document whether the release is recommended for broad use – and when needed, we go back and update the recommendations.

Announcing Linkerd 2.19: Post-quantum cryptography

William Morgan — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today we’re happy to announce Linkerd 2.19! This release introduces a significant state-of-the-art security improvement for Linkerd: a modernized TLS stack that uses post-quantum key exchange algorithms by default.

Linkerd has now seen almost a decade of continuous improvement and evolution. Our goal is to build a service mesh that our users can rely on for 100 years. To do this, we partner with users like Grammarly to ensure that Linkerd can accelerate the full scale and scope of modern software environments—and then we feed those lessons directly back into the product. Linkerd 2.19 release is the third major version since the announcement of Buoyant’s profitability and Linkerd project sustainability a year ago, and continues our laser focus on operational simplicity—delivering the notoriously complex service mesh feature set in a way that is manageable, scalable, and performant.

Hands off Linkerd certificate rotation

Matthew McLane — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally published on Matthew McLane’s Medium blog.

I’ll start by saying that I think Linkerd is a great tool. We use it at work to provide TLS between our pods, which frees us from having to build that functionality directly into our containers. When it works, it’s fantastic! It’s simple to get up and running and just does the job without a lot of extra fuss. For the most part, it’s been a very hands-off experience, which is exactly what we need.

Beyond linkerd-viz: Linkerd Metrics with OpenTelemetry

Eli Goldberg, Linkerd Ambassador — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

Linkerd, the enterprise-grade service mesh that minimizes overhead, now integrates with OpenTelemetry, often also simply called OTel. That’s pretty cool because it allows you to collect and export Linkerd’s metrics to your favorite observability tools. This integration improves your ability to monitor and troubleshoot applications effectively. Sounds interesting? Read on.

Before we dive into this topic, I want to be sure you have a basic understanding of Kubernetes. If you’re new to it, that’s ok! But I’d recommend exploring the official Kubernetes tutorials and/or experimenting with “Kind” (Kubernetes in Docker) with this simple guide.

Linkerd Edge Release Roundup: September 2025

Flynn — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the September 2025 Edge Release Roundup post, where we dive into the most recent edge releases to help keep everyone up to date on the latest and greatest! This post covers edge releases from August 2025.