Features

Linkerd offers many features, outlined below. For our walkthroughs and guides, please see the Linkerd task docs. For a reference, see the Linkerd reference docs.

Linkerd’s features

• HTTP, HTTP/2, and gRPC Proxying
  Linkerd will automatically enable advanced features (including metrics, load balancing, retries, and more) for HTTP, HTTP/2, and gRPC connections.
• TCP Proxying and Protocol Detection
  Linkerd is capable of proxying all TCP traffic, including TLS'd connections, WebSockets, and HTTP tunneling.
• Retries and Timeouts
  Linkerd can perform service-specific retries and timeouts.
• Automatic mTLS
  Linkerd automatically enables mutual Transport Layer Security (TLS) for all communication between meshed applications.
• Ingress
  Linkerd can work alongside your ingress controller of choice.
• Telemetry and Monitoring
  Linkerd automatically collects metrics from all services that send traffic through it.
• Load Balancing
  Linkerd automatically load balances requests across all destination endpoints on HTTP, HTTP/2, and gRPC connections.
• Authorization Policy
  Linkerd can restrict which types of traffic are allowed between meshed services.
• Automatic Proxy Injection
  Linkerd will automatically inject the data plane proxy into your pods based annotations.
• CNI Plugin
  Linkerd can optionally use a CNI plugin instead of an init-container to avoid NET_ADMIN capabilities.
• Dashboard and on-cluster metrics stack
  Linkerd provides a full on-cluster metrics stack, including CLI tools and dashboards.
• Distributed Tracing
  You can enable distributed tracing support in Linkerd.
• Dynamic Request Routing
  Linkerd can route individual HTTP requests based on their properties.
• Egress
  Linkerd features capabilities to monitor and apply policies to egress traffic.
• Fault Injection
  Linkerd provides mechanisms to programmatically inject failures into services.
• High Availability
  The Linkerd control plane can run in high availability (HA) mode.
• HTTP Access Logging
  Linkerd proxies can be configured to emit HTTP access logs.
• HTTPRoutes
  Linkerd can use the HTTPRoute resource to configure per-route policies.
• Iptables-nft Support
  Linkerd's init container can use iptables-nft on systems that require it.
• IPv6 Support
  Linkerd is compatible with both IPv6-only and dual-stack clusters.
• Multi-cluster communication
  Linkerd can transparently and securely connect services that are running in different clusters.
• Non-Kubernetes workloads (mesh expansion)
  
• Rate Limiting
  Linkerd offers a simple and performant HTTP local rate limiting solution to protect services from misbehaved clients
• Service Profiles
  Linkerd's service profiles enable per-route metrics as well as retries and timeouts.
• Traffic Split (canaries, blue/green deploys)
  Linkerd can dynamically send a portion of traffic to different services.