Blog | Linkerd

Deep Dive: How linkerd-destination works in the Linkerd Service Mesh

Bezaleel Silva, Linkerd Ambassador — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally published on Bezaleel Silva’s Medium blog.

Recently, in our daily operations, we took a deep dive into the inner workings of linkerd-destination, one of the most critical components of the Linkerd control plane.

The motivation was simple: as our cluster grew and traffic increased, the question shifted from “Does Linkerd work?” to “How exactly does it react when everything changes at once?”. Frequent deployments, production scaling, security policies being applied — and at the center of all this, the destination service.

Linkerd Protocol Detection

Nawaz Dhandala — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally published on the OneUptime blog. The cover photo is derived from an image by OpenClipart-Vectors.

Linkerd is a lightweight service mesh that provides observability, reliability, and security for Kubernetes applications. One of its powerful features is automatic protocol detection, which allows Linkerd to identify the protocol being used by incoming connections without requiring explicit configuration.

This automatic detection enables Linkerd to apply protocol-specific features like HTTP metrics, retries, and load balancing strategies without manual annotation of every service.

Linkerd Edge Release Roundup: December 2025

Flynn — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Announcing Linkerd 2.19: Post-quantum cryptography

William Morgan — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today we’re happy to announce Linkerd 2.19! This release introduces a significant state-of-the-art security improvement for Linkerd: a modernized TLS stack that uses post-quantum key exchange algorithms by default.

Linkerd has now seen almost a decade of continuous improvement and evolution. Our goal is to build a service mesh that our users can rely on for 100 years. To do this, we partner with users like Grammarly to ensure that Linkerd can accelerate the full scale and scope of modern software environments—and then we feed those lessons directly back into the product. Linkerd 2.19 release is the third major version since the announcement of Buoyant’s profitability and Linkerd project sustainability a year ago, and continues our laser focus on operational simplicity—delivering the notoriously complex service mesh feature set in a way that is manageable, scalable, and performant.

Hands off Linkerd certificate rotation

Matthew McLane — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally published on Matthew McLane’s Medium blog.

I’ll start by saying that I think Linkerd is a great tool. We use it at work to provide TLS between our pods, which frees us from having to build that functionality directly into our containers. When it works, it’s fantastic! It’s simple to get up and running and just does the job without a lot of extra fuss. For the most part, it’s been a very hands-off experience, which is exactly what we need.

Beyond linkerd-viz: Linkerd Metrics with OpenTelemetry

Eli Goldberg, Linkerd Ambassador — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

Linkerd, the enterprise-grade service mesh that minimizes overhead, now integrates with OpenTelemetry, often also simply called OTel. That’s pretty cool because it allows you to collect and export Linkerd’s metrics to your favorite observability tools. This integration improves your ability to monitor and troubleshoot applications effectively. Sounds interesting? Read on.

Before we dive into this topic, I want to be sure you have a basic understanding of Kubernetes. If you’re new to it, that’s ok! But I’d recommend exploring the official Kubernetes tutorials and/or experimenting with “Kind” (Kubernetes in Docker) with this simple guide.

Linkerd Edge Release Roundup: September 2025

Flynn — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the September 2025 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! This post covers edge releases from August 2025.

How to give feedback

Innovating with a Rock-Solid Foundation While Saving 40% on Networking Costs: Imagine Learning's Journey with Linkerd

Blake Romano, Senior Software Engineer, Imagine Learning — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At Imagine Learning, we strive to empower educators and inspire breakthrough moments for over 18 million students across the United States. As a digital-first education solutions provider, our mission is to deliver robust, reliable, and secure experiences to support the boundless potential of K-12 learners. Achieving this at scale—spanning hundreds of thousands of daily users—requires a technical foundation as innovative as our products.

To meet these demands, our engineering team has embraced modern cloud-native technologies. The cornerstone of our infrastructure is Linkerd, supported by Buoyant, running on Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Linkerd gives us the critical capabilities that we need to scale effortlessly while maintaining the performance and reliability that our users depend on.

Linkerd Edge Release Roundup: August 2025

Flynn — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the August 2025 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! This post covers edge releases from June and July 2025.

How to give feedback

Building your Infrastructure with Tilt, Linkerd, and Nginx (part 2)

Chris Campbell, Linkerd Ambassador — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is part two of a series by Linkerd Ambassador Chris Campbell exploring how to bridge the gap between development and production by using Linkerd, Tilt, and Ingress-Nginx to create a robust environment in which you can develop using your real production infrastructure.

In Part 1 of this series, we built a simple microservices demo with Linkerd on a local Kubernetes cluster using Tilt. Our demo consists of three services (foo, bar, and baz) that communicate via HTTP REST. In this second part, we’ll extend our demo to support gRPC communication and explore some of Linkerd’s helpful features for managing gRPC services.