Linkerd Edge Release Roundup: August 2024

Welcome to the August 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

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 @djryanj for his 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. Happily, there are no breaking changes here.

The releases

The big story for this month is definitely edge-24.7.5: this massive release brings together a lot of threads of work to provide us the bones of the upcoming Linkerd 2.16 release. Of course, each edge release has bugfixes and many dependency updates; we won’t list them all here, but you can find them in the release notes for each release.

edge-24.7.5 (July 26, 2024)

This release supports Server-scoped default policy, policy audit mode, GRPCRoute, and new retry and timeout configuration (including for Gateway API resources). There’s a lot to unpack here:

• Server-scoped default policy: you can use the new accessPolicy field of a Server to override the default inbound policy for that Server. The default is deny, for backward compatibility.

• Policy audit mode: setting the default inbound policy or a Server’s accessPolicy to audit allows traffic to flow, but logs anything that would be denied.

• GRPCRoute: this release includes support for the Gateway API GRPCRoute. Remember to set enableHttpRoutes to false when installing if you don’t want Linkerd to manage the Gateway API CRDs for you!

• New retry and timeout configuration: you can now configure retries and timeouts with annotations on Service, HTTPRoute, or GRPCRoute resources, with HTTPRoute and GRPCRoute taking precedence over Service if there are overlaps. Note that these are counted retries, rather than the budgeted retries provided when you configure retries in a Server: you will configure a maximum number of retries rather than a percentage of retries.

edge-24.7.4 (July 25, 2024)

This release correctly supports IPv6 in the Linkerd CNI network-validator and repair-controller containers.

edge-24.7.3 (July 19, 2024)

This release updates the documentation on what networkValidator.connectAddr in the Helm chart means (thanks, @djryanj!).

edge-24.7.2 (July 15, 2024)

This release bumps dependencies but has no functional changes from edge-24.7.1.

edge-24.7.1 (July 4, 2024)

This release removes the empty shortnames fields from the ExternalWorkload CRD.

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.