Linkerd: Up and Running

Preface

Service meshes need a little reputational rehab.

Many cloud native practitioners seem to have in mind that meshes are frightening, complex things, things to be avoided until examined as a last resort to save a dying application. We’d love to change that: service meshes are incredible tools for making developing and operating cloud native applications dramatically easier than it would otherwise be.

And, of course, we think Linkerd is the best mesh out there at making things easy for people.

So if you’ve been tearing your hair out trying to understand a misbehaving application based just on its logs, or if you’ve spent months trying to get some other mesh running and you just want things to work, or if you’re trying to explain to yet another developer why they really don’t need to worry about coding retries and mTLS into their microservice…​you’re in the right place. We’re glad you’re here.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is meant to help anyone who thinks it’s easier to get things done when creating, running, or debugging microservices applications, and is looking to Linkerd to help with that. While we think that the book will benefit people who are interested in Linkerd for its own sake, Linkerd—like computing itself—is ultimately a means, not an end. This book reflects that.

Beyond that, it doesn’t matter to us whether you’re an application developer, a cluster operator, a platform engineer, or whatever; there should be something in here to help you get the most ...