Linkerd at KubeCon EU 2019: Benchmarks, SMI, VSCode, and more
Linkerd momentum was at an all-time high at last week’s KubeCon EU! This was the biggest Kubecon yet, with 7,500+ attendees, over 200 talks, and a huge amount of Linkerd momentum. Here’s a quick recap of most of the Linkerd news.
Linkerd Benchmarks
On Saturday, the folks at Kinvolk published their Linkerd Benchmarks, comparing Linkerd, Istio, and bare metal, and showing you the resource cost of adding the service mesh to your infrastructure. The results may or may not surprise you.
Microsoft and Linkerd
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced the Service Mesh Interface, a specification that exposes core service mesh features like telemetry, traffic shifting, and policy via Kubernetes primitives. Linkerd was a major part of the SMI launch, and we’re excited about the opportunities this opens up for us, especially around integrations like Kiali, Flagger, and Kubecost!
On Wednesday, the VSCode team launched a Linkerd VSCode plugin, adding cool Linkerd functionality to your local VSCode editor! (See the talk here.)
DigitalOcean and Linkerd
Right in the middle of Kubecon, Digital Ocean’s Kubernetes Service officially went to GA (General Availability), with a little hidden feature in the UI:
OpenFaaS integration
One of the exciting hot topics at the conference was the OpenFaaS Linkerd integration, allowing OpenFaaS users to automatically encrypt communication between functions! (You can read the full guide here.)
OpenFaaS on Kubernetes with @Linkerd 2! mTLS all the things for e2e encryption. Try out the new guide from @matiaspan26 or just "have a mesh" - we'd love feedback on Slack/GitHub. https://t.co/ngUJWz1950 #faas #kubecon #cloudnative #cncf #mesh pic.twitter.com/5qfLsdhQNL
— Alex Ellis (@alexellisuk) May 16, 2019
And, of course, lots and lots of talks!
As always, there was a long list of Linkerd talks at Kubecon If you couldn’t make the conference in person, never fear, the recordings are already live.
- Keynote: CNCF Project Update w/Linkerd: Bryan Liles, VMware
- Lightning talk: Why Your OSS Project Needs A GUI: Risha Mars, Buoyant
- Intro to Linkerd: William Morgan, Buoyant
- Scavenging for Reusable Code in the Kubernetes Codebase: Kevin Lingerfelt, Buoyant
- What WePay Learned From Processing Billions of Dollars Using Linkerd: Mohsen Rezaei, WePay
- JustFootball’s Journey to gRPC + Linkerd in Production: Ben Lambert, Just Football & Kevin Lingerfelt, Buoyant
- Grow with Less Pains: Meshing From Monolith to Microservices: Leo Liang, Cruise Automation
- Building Cloud Native GDPR Friendly Systems for Data Collection: Zsolt Homorodi, VTT
- Autoscaling Multi-Cluster Observability with Thanos and Linkerd: Andrew Seigner, Buoyant & Frederic Branczyk, Red Hat
- Deep Dive: Linkerd: Oliver Gould, Buoyant
- Dealing with the Pesky Path Parameter Problem: Service Profiles: Alex Leong, Buoyant
Wrapping it all up
This was another great Kubecon for Linkerd. It was incredible to meet so many enthusiastic and friendly people, and we can’t wait to do it all again this November in San Diego!
Full room to hear about autoscaling observability with @linkerd and @ThanosMetrics by @fredbrancz and Andrew Seigner. WITH live demo! ♥️#KubeConEu #CloudNativeCon pic.twitter.com/plNLN8z6AD
— Bartłomiej Płotka (@bwplotka) May 23, 2019
Interesting overview of using @linkerd v1 with @kubernetesio and VMs, via @MohsenRezaeiThe at #KubeCon
— Daniel Bryant (@danielbryantuk) May 21, 2019
Lots of benefits of using a mesh mentioned: simplicity of service diacovery; cross-DC routing; passive health checks; monitoring; and more pic.twitter.com/kC84vecUSi
Linkerd is a community project and is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. If you have feature requests, questions, or comments, we’d love to have you join our rapidly-growing community! Linkerd is hosted on GitHub, and we have a thriving community on Slack, Twitter, and the mailing lists. Come and join the fun!
