Linkerd Edge Release Roundup: July 2024

Welcome to the July 2024 Edge Release Roundup post, where we dive into the most recent edge releases to help keep everyone up to date on the latest and greatest!

How to give feedback

Remember, edge releases are a snapshot of our current development work on main; by definition, they always have the most recent features but they may have incomplete features, features that end up getting rolled back later, or (like all software) even bugs. That said, edge releases are intended for production use, and go through a rigorous set of automated and manual tests before being released.

We would be delighted to hear how these releases work out for you! You can open a GitHub issue or discussion, join us on Slack, or visit the Buoyant Linkerd Forum – all are great ways to reach us.

Community contributions

We couldn’t do what we do without the Linkerd community, and this batch of releases is definitely no exception. Huge thanks to Adrian Callejas and John Howard for their contributions! You’ll find more information about all of these contributions in the release-by-release details below.

Recommendations and breaking changes

All these releases are recommended for general use, but there are two breaking changes:

• First, as of edge-24.6.2, we change the proxy’s /shutdown endpoint to disabled by default. If you want to reenable it, you’ll need to set proxy.enableShutdownEndpoint to true on installation or upgrade.

• Second, as of edge-24.6.4, it’s no longer possible - or necessary! - to explicitly set the resource requests for proxy-init. There’s more information on this in the section for edge-24.6.4.

The releases

We’ve mostly been fixing bugs in these edge releases. Of course, each edge release has many dependency updates; we won’t list them all here, but you can find them in the release notes for each release.

edge-24.6.4 (June 27, 2024)

This release changes the proxy-init container to always request the same amount of memory and CPU as the proxy itself, and removes the ability to explicitly set proxy-init’s requests because there’s now no need to do so. (This doesn’t increase the resources required for the pod as a whole, because the proxy-init container completes before the proxy starts, letting the proxy reuse resources requested by the proxy-init container. For full details, check out issue #11320).

It also continues work on upcoming GRPCRoute support. Finally, if proxy.logHTTPHeaders is somehow empty, it correctly defaults to “off”.

edge-24.6.3 (June 20, 2024)

edge-24.6.3 adds the linkerd.io/control-plane-ns label to the ext-namespace-metadata-linkerd-config Role, for parity with the other resources created when installing Linkerd.

edge-24.6.2 (June 14, 2024)

Starting in this release, the proxy’s /shutdown endpoint is disabled by default. It can be reenabled by setting proxy.enableShutdownEndpoint to true when installing or upgrading. Beyond that, edge-24.6.2 fixes several bugs: EndpointSlices with no hostname field are supported (thanks, Adrian Callejas!), DNS resolution errors are correctly logged (and the resolver’s log level can be configured), the proxy’s administration endpoints function correctly on systems using IPv4-mapped IPv6, and the init container and CNI plugin will not attempt to start on systems that configure IPv6 but don’t support ip6tables. Finally, it supports controlling whether or not HTTP headers are logged in debug output (with the default being “not”), JSON output for the link, unlink, allow, and allow-scrapes CLI commands, and fixes a typo in the output of linkerd diagnostics (thanks, John Howard!)

edge-24.6.1 (June 10, 2024)

This release adds support for JSON output to linkerd install and related commands.

Installing the latest edge release

Installing the latest edge release needs just a single command.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSfL https://run.linkerd.io/install-edge | sh

You can also install edge releases with Helm.

Linkerd is for everyone

Linkerd is a graduated project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Linkerd is committed to open governance. 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 in mailing lists. Come and join the fun!

Linkerd generally does new edge releases weekly; watch this space to keep up-to-date. Feedback on this blog series is welcome! Just ping @flynn on the Linkerd Slack.