Linkerd Edge Release Roundup: December 2025

Welcome to the excessively-large December 2025 Edge Release Roundup posts, where we dive into the most recent edge releases to help keep everyone up to date on the latest and greatest! This post covers edge releases from September through November 2025 (the runup to KubeCon was hectic around here).

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. Once released, we also document whether the release is recommended for broad use – and when needed, we go back and update the recommendations.

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.

Recommendations and breaking changes

Spoiler alert: if you’re looking at edge releases from the latter chunk of 2025, we recommend you skip straight to edge-25.11.3 to take full advantage of fixes along the way. However, any RECOMMENDED release is fair game.

As usual, we have some breaking changes to call out:

As of edge-25.11.3, the proxy-init image has been merged with the proxy image to simplify image management. Since we no longer ship a separate proxy-init image, if you were explicitly referencing that image you’ll need to update your references to use the proxy image instead.
As of edge-25.10.3, the ip_port_subscribers metric has been removed and replaced with the lower-cardinality workload_subscribers metric. This change is intended to reduce the cardinality of metrics and improve performance.
As of edge-25.10.2, support for the (long-deprecated) OpenCensus trace protocol has been removed. The OpenTelemetry protocol is now the only supported tracing protocol.
As of edge-25.10.1, the linkerd-jaeger extension has been removed: instead, Linkerd supports directly configuring OpenTelemetry tracing by setting controller.tracing.enable and controller.tracing.collector.endpoint when installing Linkerd.
As of edge-25.9.4, the linkerd-crds Helm chart will no longer install the Gateway API CRDs by default. This change may require attention when upgrading; see below for details.

Also as of edge-25.10.2, native sidecar support moves to beta, adding the config.beta.linkerd.io/proxy-enable-native-sidecar annotation and deprecating the alpha annotation (although that will continue to function).

Gateway API and Upgrading

As of edge-25.9.4, the linkerd-crds Helm chart will no longer install the Gateway API CRDs by default. To force the chart to install the Gateway API CRDs, set installGatewayAPI=true when installing the chart.

If you’re upgrading from a previous release of Linkerd, and you originally used the linkerd-crds chart to install the Gateway API CRDs, you may need to take extra action:

If you’re already running Linkerd 2.18/edge-25.4.4 or higher, you’re good to go. The Gateway API CRDs that you originally installed with Helm will stay on the cluster when you do the upgrade.
If you’re running something older, you’ll need to set --reuse-values when upgrading, to make sure that the existing Gateway API CRDs stay installed.

The releases

As always, each edge release includes many dependency updates which we won’t list here. You can find them in the full release notes for each release.

edge-25.11.3 (November 27, 2025)

This release merges the proxy-init image into the proxy image, simplifying image management and reducing overall image size – make sure to update any explicit references to the proxy-init image. It also correctly honors the timeouts.request value of HTTPRoutes in the gateway.networking.k8s.io API group, to match the behavior of policy.linkerd.io HTTPRoutes.

edge-25.11.2 (November 20, 2025)

This release is not recommended; use edge-25.11.3 instead.

This release fixes broken documentation URLs in CLI commands (thanks, beza!) and corrects a typo in the EgressNetwork and ExternalWorkload CRD definitions (thanks, YY!). Unfortunately, it also fails to correctly handle SPIRE when using mesh expansion; we recommend using edge-25.11.3 instead.

edge-25.11.1 (November 06, 2025)

This release correctly includes pod metadata in OpenTelemetry traces, fixes the workload_subscribers metric to correctly track the total number of subscribers across all IP and port combinations (rather than only the most recent combination), and prevents a task leak when using federated services.

edge-25.10.7 (October 29, 2025)

This release includes more guardrails for tracing configuration in the Helm chart, notably including fixing a possible crash if the tracing collector endpoint is not set.