Feb 21, 2024: Announcing Linkerd 2.15 with support for VM workloads, native sidecars, and SPIFFE! Read more »

Releases and Versions

Linkerd publishes and announces versions that correspond to specific project milestones and sets of new features. These versions are available in different types of release artifacts.

Recent versions

Linkerd 2.15

Linkerd 2.15 was announced on February 21, 2024.

Known distributions of Linkerd 2.15:

Types of release artifacts

Edge releases

Edge release artifacts are published on a weekly or near-weekly basis as part of the open source project. The latest edge release is edge-24.7.5. and the full list of edge release artifacts can be found on the Linkerd GitHub releases page.

Edge release artifacts contain the code in from the main branch at the point in time when they were cut. This means they always have the latest features and fixes, and have undergone automated testing as well as maintainer code review. Edge releases may involve partial features that are later modified or backed out. They may also involve breaking changes—of course, we do our best to avoid this.

Edge releases are generally considered production ready, and the project will mark specific releases as “not recommended” if bugs are discovered after release.

Edge release versioning follows the form edge-y.m.n, where y is the last two digits of the year, m is the numeric month, and n is numeric edge release count for that month. For example, edge-24.1.3 is the third edge release shipped in January 2024.

Each major version has a corresponding edge release, indicated by version-2.X tags: for example, there is a version-2.15 tag that corresponds to edge-24.2.4. Of course, you may choose to run later edge releases, which will include further bugfixes and enhancements.

Using edge release artifacts and reporting bugs helps us ensure a rapid pace of development and is a great way to help Linkerd. We publish edge release guidance as part of the release notes and strive to always provide production-ready artifacts.

Stable releases

Stable release artifacts of Linkerd follow semantic versioning, whereby changes in major version denote large feature additions and possible breaking changes and changes in minor versions denote safe upgrades without breaking changes.

As of February 2024, the Linkerd open source project itself no longer provides stable release artifacts. Instead, the vendor community around Linkerd is responsible for creating stable release artifacts.