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

Automatic mTLS. Linkerd automatically enables mutual Transport Layer Security (TLS) for all communication between meshed applications.

Automatic Proxy Injection. Linkerd will automatically inject the data plane proxy into your pods based annotations.

CNI Plugin. Linkerd can be configured to run a CNI plugin that rewrites each pod's iptables rules automatically.

Dashboard and Grafana. Linkerd provides a web dashboard, as well as pre-configured Grafana dashboards.

Distributed Tracing. You can enable distributed tracing support in Linkerd.

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, 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.

Ingress. Linkerd can work alongside your ingress controller of choice.

Load Balancing. Linkerd automatically load balances requests across all destination endpoints on HTTP, HTTP/2, and gRPC connections.

Multi-cluster communication. Linkerd can transparently and securely connect services that are running in different clusters.

Retries and Timeouts. Linkerd can perform service-specific retries and timeouts.

Service Profiles. Linkerd's service profiles enable per-route metrics as well as retries and timeouts.

TCP Proxying and Protocol Detection. Linkerd is capable of proxying all TCP traffic, including TLS'd connections, WebSockets, and HTTP tunneling.

Telemetry and Monitoring. Linkerd automatically collects metrics from all services that send traffic through it.

Traffic Split (canaries, blue/green deploys). Linkerd can dynamically send a portion of traffic to different services.