Linkerd: Up and Running

Chapter 3. Deploying Linkerd

Now that you understand what Linkerd is and a bit about how it works, it’s time to dig into deploying Linkerd in your environment. We’re going to dive into the whats, whys, and hows of installing Linkerd in this chapter. You can also check out the official Linkerd docs to review the getting started guide.

Considerations

Installing Linkerd can often be quick, easy, and painless. Unfortunately, some of that ease of use can mask real pitfalls that you’ll want to avoid. We’ll dive more into the specifics when we get to the install section—for now, suffice it to say that when you install Linkerd in your actual non-demo environments, you’ll want to be sure to plan for generating and storing the TLS certificates we briefly described in Chapter 2. You’ll also want to be sure you have a good understanding of all non-HTTP ports being used by your applications, so that you can configure protocol discovery correctly for them (this is covered in more detail in Chapter 4).

Linkerd Versioning

We mentioned in Chapter 2 that this book is focused exclusively on Linkerd2, the second major version of Linkerd, which is effectively a rewrite of the project. In recognition of that, Linkerd uses a versioning system that looks like semantic versioning but is, in fact, distinct. Linkerd has two major release channels: stable and edge. You can read more about this versioning scheme and release model in the official Linkerd documentation.

Stable

The stable channel is used ...