Linkerd Edge Release Roundup: September 2024

Welcome to the September 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 @mozemke 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. Happily, there are no breaking changes here.

The releases

August’s edge releases look small, but edge-24.8.1 and edge-24.8.2 provided the finishing touches for Linkerd 2.16, which shipped on August 13! 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.

One thing to be aware of here: as of edge-24.8.1, the GRPCRoute CRD is optional; if you don’t install it before installing Linkerd, Linkerd will run without GRPCRoute support, and you’ll need to restart the Linkerd control plane if you add the GRPCRoute CRD after installing Linkerd.

edge-24.8.3 (August 29, 2024)

This release starts the Linkerd 2.17 development cycle, with two fixes for Linkerd Viz: it correctly supports setting the group ID using the linkerd-viz Helm chart (thanks, @mozemke!) and it cleans up font downloading to avoid WAF errors.

edge-24.8.2 (August 5, 2024)

This final touch for Linkerd 2.16 makes certain that Linkerd won’t attempt to bind to IPv6 addresses at all unless IPv6 is enabled.

edge-24.8.1 (August 2, 2024)

This release makes GRPCRoute optional: if you don’t have the GRPCRoute CRD installed when Linkerd starts, Linkerd will run without any GRPCRoute functionality rather than failing to start. (If you add the GRPCRoute CRD after Linkerd is running, you’ll need to restart the Linkerd control plane to enable GRPCRoute support.)

edge-24.8.1 also improves the status text when an HTTPRoute is incorrectly configured with parentRef pointing to a headless service, to make this situation easier to debug, and makes certain that trace-level logs honor proxy.logHTTPHeaders.

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.