linkerd

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https://linkerd.io/2.12/overview/ https://linkerd.io/what-is-a-service-mesh/#

What is a service mesh?

tl;dr: A service mesh like Linkerd is a tool for adding observability, security, and reliability features to “cloud native” applications by transparently inserting this functionality at the platform layer rather than the application layer. The service mesh is rapidly becoming a standard part of the cloud native stack, especially for Kubernetes adopters.

Over the past few years, the service mesh has risen from relative obscurity to become a standard component of the cloud native stack. Linkerd (“linkerd-dee”), the first service mesh project, was admitted to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in early 2017, rewritten to use Rust micro-proxies in 2018, and is now in production at organizations around the world like Microsoft, HP, and Nordstrom. In 2021 Linkerd became the only service mesh in the world to attain CNCF graduation.

But what is a service mesh, exactly? And why is it such a hot topic? In this article, I’ll define the service mesh and trace its lineage through shifts in application architecture over the past decade. We’ll take a quick look into how the service mesh works. Finally, I’ll describe where the service mesh is heading and what to expect as this concept evolves alongside cloud native adoption.

(You may also like: The Service Mesh: What Every Software Engineer Needs to Know about the World’s Most Over-Hyped Technology.)

https://picluster.ricsanfre.com/docs/service-mesh/

Why Linkerd and not Istio

ARM support

Most known Service Mesh implementation, Istio, is not currently supporting ARM64 architecture. Linkerd, which is a CNCF graduated project, does support ARM64 architectures since release 2.9. See linkerd 2.9 announcement.

Performance and reduced footprint

Linkerd uses its own implementation of the communications proxy, a sidecar container that need to be deployed with any Pod as to inctercep all inbound/outbound traffic. Instead of using a generic purpose proxy (Envoy proxy) used by others service mesh implementations (Istio, Consul), a specifc proxy tailored only to cover Kubernetes communications has been developed. Covering just Kubernetes scenario, allows Linkerd proxy to be a simpler, lighter, faster and more secure proxy.

Linkerd ulta-light proxy with a reduced memory/cpu footprint and its better performance makes it more suitable for nodes with reduced computing capabilities like Raspberry Pis.

As a reference of performance/footprint comparison this is the lastest Istio vs Linkerd benchmarking.

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Architecture

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What are the benefits of Linkerd?

• While Istio is quite difficult to set up in the cluster, for Linkerd no configuration required, it works out of the box.
• It allows for easy scaling horizontally.
• It supports HTTP, http/2, gRPC and pretty much all commonly used protocols.
• Allows TLS application wide.
• Highly intelligent distributes traffic using modern load-balancing algorithms.
• Allows request routing dynamically and shifts traffic accordingly.
• It provides distributed tracing to trace the root cause of issues.
• It aligns well with the modern Microservices world.
• Provides features such as resilience, observability, and load balancing.
• It provides Prometheus and Grafana out of the box.
• It also has its own dashboard great to observe what’s happening in Real-Time.

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https://tech.loveholidays.com/linkerd-at-loveholidays-our-journey-to-a-production-service-mesh-9a6cd478d395