Welcome to the October 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 Lauri Kuittinen, Vadim Makerov, and @kristjankullerkann-wearemp 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. There is one breaking
change: starting in edge-24.9.2, the timestamp in JSON-formatted proxy
logs are now ISO8601 strings (for example, 2024-09-09T13:38:56.919918Z).
This is an oft-requested feature but, of course, still a breaking change.
Additionally, it’s important to realize that edge-24.9.3 introduces a
change to the Link CRD that’s not compatible with previous versions of the
Linkerd CLI. If you’re using Linkerd multicluster, you’ll need to either
upgrade every linkerd cluster to edge-24.9.3 at the same time, or plan to
hold off until edge-24.10.2.
The releases
September’s releases bring in some new improvements to Linkerd statistics and also some important bugfixes. Of course, each edge release includes many dependency updates which we won’t list here, but you can find them in the release notes for each release.
edge-24.9.3 (September 27, 2024)
edge-24.9.3 fixes a panic that would occur if a retried response arrived
before the retried request was complete. This may sound bizarre, but it is
allowed by the HTTP/2 specification, and using wire-gprc with retries
enabled tended to trip over this in the real world.
This release also supports configuring the timeout and failure threshold for
health probes for the multicluster gateway, to improve reliability in the face
of networking issues between clusters. A caution with edge-24.9.3 is that
its CLI will have trouble with linkerd clusters that are running earlier
releases (looking into the future a bit, edge-24.10.2 fixes this issue).
edge-24.9.2 (September 12, 2024)
Starting in edge-24.9.2, JSON-formatted proxy logs render timestamps as
ISO8601 strings, rather than fractional seconds since proxy startup (fixing
issue 12505). For example, you might see a log like
{"timestamp":"2024-09-09T13:38:56.919918Z","level":"INFO","fields":{"message":"Using single-threaded proxy runtime"},"target":"linkerd2_proxy::rt","threadId":"ThreadId(1)"}
This release also publishes quite a few new internal metrics to provide
insight into how the proxy runtime is performing, and publishes the proxy’s
current time as a metric, which should make it easier to be sure of when
certificates will need to be rotated. It also allows setting
TCP_USER_TIMEOUT for TCP sockets (thanks, Vadim Makerov!), updates the
Helm documentation to include recently-added values, and removes some
redundant dashes in the identity controller’s Helm templates. Finally, Linkerd
Viz in this release supports reading credentials from a Secret for using
Prometheus with HTTP Basic authentication.
edge-24.9.1 (September 6, 2024)
In edge-24.9.1, Linkerd Viz gets the new linkerd viz stat-inbound and
linkerd viz stat-outbound commands, which provide cleaner access from the
command line to the new metrics available based on Gateway API routes, for
example:
$ linkerd viz stat-outbound -n faces deploy/face
NAME SERVICE ROUTE TYPE BACKEND SUCCESS RPS LATENCY_P50 LATENCY_P95 LATENCY_P99 TIMEOUTS RETRIES
face smiley:80 smiley-route HTTPRoute 78.36% 6.32 41ms 5886ms 9177ms 0.00% 0.00%
├─────────────────────► smiley:80 79.34% 5.57 20ms 5725ms 9145ms 0.00%
└─────────────────────► smiley2:80 71.11% 0.75 22ms 6850ms 9370ms 0.00%
face color:80 color-route GRPCRoute 80.10% 6.37 25ms 48ms 50ms 0.00% 0.00%
├─────────────────────► color:80 80.12% 2.68 12ms 24ms 25ms 0.00%
└─────────────────────► color2:80 80.00% 3.67 12ms 24ms 25ms 0.00%
In this example, we have traffic splitting set up using GRPCRoutes and HTTPRoutes.
This release also adds dualstack support for ExternalWorkload, Helm support for tuning liveness and readiness probe timeouts (thanks @kristjankullerkann-wearemp!), and Helm support for configuring externalTrafficPolicy for multicluster gateways (thanks Lauri Kuittinen!).
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.
