Feb 21, 2024: Announcing Linkerd 2.15 with support for VM workloads, native sidecars, and SPIFFE! Read more »

Linkerd at KubeCon EU 2019: Benchmarks, SMI, VSCode, and more

William Morgan

William Morgan
May 31, 2019 • 3 min read

Linkerd at KCCNCEU19

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.

Linkerd benchmark graph

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:

Digital Ocean Linkerd screenshot

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.)

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.

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!


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!

Suggested Blog Posts