KubeCon + CloudNativeCon sponsored this post, in anticipation of Linkerd can deliver critical features such as transparent mutual TLS, gRPC load balancing, blue-green deploys, and golden metrics. But like all abstractions, these features come at a cost. Some of this cost is human in nature: the more complex the service mesh, the more effort required to operate it successfully. Some of the cost is system cost: a service mesh consumes CPU and memory, and introduces latency to the application.
Linkerd’s goal is to minimize this cost by being the smallest, fastest service mesh for Kubernetes (a claim which