Linkerd Service Mesh

/linkerd-service-mesh

When to Use

• Automatic mTLS for all inter-agent traffic without code changes (lighter than Istio)
• Per-route success rates, p99 latency: which agent endpoint is degraded?
• Traffic splitting: canary deploy with automatic success-rate-gated rollout
• Retries and timeouts: mesh-level reliability without retry logic in application code

Do NOT use for

• Complex L7 routing policies (use [[istio-traffic-management]])
• Non-Kubernetes environments

Install Linkerd

# Install CLI
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSfL https://run.linkerd.io/install -o /tmp/linkerd-install.sh
# Inspect first: head -40 /tmp/linkerd-install.sh — then run if safe:
sh /tmp/linkerd-install.sh

# Pre-flight check
linkerd check --pre

# Install control plane
linkerd install --crds | kubectl apply -f -
linkerd install        | kubectl apply -f -
linkerd check

Inject Linkerd proxy (annotation or CLI)

# Annotation on Deployment (auto-inject on rollout)
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name:      yamtam-agent
  namespace: yamtam
  annotations:
    linkerd.io/inject: enabled   # sidecar injected on pod creation
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      annotations:
        linkerd.io/inject: enabled

# Or inject all deployments in namespace
kubectl get deploy -n yamtam -o yaml \
  | linkerd inject - \
  | kubectl apply -f -

# Verify injection
linkerd check --proxy -n yamtam

Automatic mTLS verification

# Check that mTLS is active between agent-a and agent-b
linkerd viz edges pod -n yamtam

# Output:
# SRC                  DST                  SECURED
# agent-a-xxxx         agent-b-xxxx         √
# → TLS certificate automatically rotated every 24h

Traffic split (canary)

apiVersion: split.smi-spec.io/v1alpha2
kind: TrafficSplit
metadata:
  name:      yamtam-canary
  namespace: yamtam
spec:
  service: yamtam-agent
  backends:
    - service: yamtam-agent-stable
      weight: "900m"   # 90%
    - service: yamtam-agent-canary
      weight: "100m"   # 10%

ServiceProfile (per-route retries and timeouts)

apiVersion: linkerd.io/v1alpha2
kind: ServiceProfile
metadata:
  name:      yamtam-agent.yamtam.svc.cluster.local
  namespace: yamtam
spec:
  routes:
    - name: POST /api/task
      condition:
        method: POST
        pathRegex: /api/task
      responseClasses:
        - condition: { status: { min: 500, max: 599 } }
          isFailure: true
      retryBudget:
        retryRatio:          0.2    # retry up to 20% of requests
        minRetriesPerSecond: 10
        ttl:                 10s
      timeout: 5s

Per-route metrics (linkerd viz)

# Real-time success rate per route
linkerd viz routes -n yamtam deploy/yamtam-agent

# OUTPUT:
# ROUTE                    SERVICE          EFFECTIVE_RPS   EFFECTIVE_SUCCESS
# POST /api/task           yamtam-agent     42.3            98.7%
# GET  /health             yamtam-agent     10.1            100.0%

# Top sources of traffic to a pod
linkerd viz top deploy/yamtam-agent -n yamtam

Anti-Fake-Pass Checklist

❌ linkerd inject without restarting pods → old pods run without sidecar; mTLS not active
❌ ServiceProfile namespace must match the Service namespace, not the client namespace
❌ TrafficSplit weights must sum to 1000m (milliunits) → non-1000 sum distributes incorrectly
❌ linkerd check failure → control plane issue; don't trust mTLS status until check passes
❌ Linkerd viz not installed → edges/routes/top commands fail; viz is separate from core
❌ retryBudget without isFailure routes → all responses retried including 200s (infinite loop)