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Linkerd at Kubecon NA 2019 roundup: Nordstrom, Microsoft, OpenFaaS, PayBase, and lots of community!

William Morgan

William Morgan
November 26, 2019 • 3 min read

Linkerd at KCCNCNA19

Once again, Linkerd momentum was at an all-time high at last week’s Kubecon NA in San Diego. This was the biggest Kubecon yet, with 10k+ attendees, hundreds of talks, and a great Linkerd presence.

If you weren’t able to make it, never fear! Most of the talk videos are already live. Here’s a quick recap of the Linkerd news.

Nordstrom’s Linkerd Deployment

One of the highlights of the show was the talk by Nordstrom engineers Hema Lee and Cody Vandermyn titled Service Mesh: There and Back Again, in which they detail Nordstrom’s service mesh journey and why they chose Linkerd.

Serverless + Service Mesh with Linkerd and OpenFaaS

OpenFaaS founder Alex Ellis joined Linkerd engineer Charles Pretzer for a great talk entitled OpenFaaS Cloud + Linkerd: A Secure, Multi-Tenant Serverless Platform. Two great open source projects that go great together!

Microsoft, Linkerd, CI/CD, and OPA

As usual, lots of great Linkerd content from our friends at Microsoft. Brian Redmond gave some great Linkerd demos in a talk entitled Supercharge Your Microservices CI/CD with Service Mesh and Kubernetes, and Microsoft’s Rita Zhang joined Linkerd engineer Ivan Sim for a presentation on Enforcing Automatic mTLS With Linkerd and OPA Gatekeeper.

Debugging Linkerd at Paybase

Sometimes even the service mesh has bugs. Paybase engineer Ana Calin joined Linkerd maintainer Risha Mars for a talk titled There’s a bug in my service mesh! What do you do when the mesh is at fault?", covering Ana and Risha’s process for identifying, triaging, reporting, and fixing bugs in service meshes. (Sadly, looks like the video isn’t up for this talk yet.)

Linkerd intro and deep dive sessions

As usual, I did my Intro to Linkerd talk, and Oliver Gould did the Linkerd Deep Dive talk. Both talks were jam-packed with people and had some really great Q&A.

Linkerd in the news

Linkerd’s momentum is not lost on the press. I particularly like this quote from Cody in Linkerd vs. Istio battle heats up as service mesh gains steam:

“We performance tested Istio and Linkerd just over a year ago, and chose Linkerd,” said Cody Vandermyn, senior engineer at Nordstrom, a large retailer headquartered in Seattle. “At the time, our tests found that for us, Linkerd introduced less latency and met our requirements around memory footprint.”

Wrapping it all up

This was another great Kubecon for Linkerd. As usual, the best part for me is the chance to meet other members of our enthusiastic and friendly community in person. I’m looking forward to doing more of the same next March in Amsterdam!

Join us!

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!

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