LINKERD-SPEC

Ultra-lightweight Rust CNCF service mesh.

Definition

Linkerd 2 architecture: Destination service (Go control plane), linkerd2-proxy sidecar (Rust, 10x lighter than Envoy). Automatic mTLS between all pods. Buoyant Cloud (managed). Linkerd 2.16 (October 2024) introduces Federated Services for multi-cluster. Philosophical distance from Istio: simplicity-first.

Origin

Linkerd 1 (Scala) launched by Buoyant February 2016 ; Linkerd 2 (Go + Rust) released September 2018.

Example in context

A B2B SaaS uses Linkerd for automatic mTLS between 50 microservices with p99 latency < 1ms.

Related terms

• Istio — direct competitor.