Features

Automatic mTLS

Linkerd automatically enables mutual Transport Layer Security (TLS) for all communication between meshed applications.

Automatic Proxy Injection

Linkerd will automatically inject the data plane proxy into your pods based annotations.

Dashboard and Grafana

Linkerd provides a web dashboard, as well as pre-configured Grafana dashboards.

Distributed Tracing

Linkerd 2.x provides some of the features of distributed tracing, but does not currently emit spans.

Experimental: CNI Plugin

Linkerd can be configured to run a CNI plugin that rewrites each pod's iptables rules automatically.

Fault Injection

Practice chaos engineering by injecting faults into services with Linkerd.

High Availability

The Linkerd control plane can run in high availability (HA) mode.

HTTP, HTTP/2, and gRPC Proxying

Linkerd will automatically enable advanced features (including metrics, load balancing, retries, and more) for HTTP, HTTP/2, and gRPC connections.

Ingress

Linkerd can work alongside your ingress controller of choice.

Load Balancing

Linkerd automatically load balances requests across all destination endpoints on HTTP, HTTP/2, and gRPC connections.

Retries and Timeouts

Linkerd can be configured to perform service-specific retries and timeouts.

Service Profiles

Linkerd supports defining service profiles that enable per-route metrics and features such as retries and timeouts.

TCP Proxying and Protocol Detection

Linkerd is capable of proxying all TCP traffic, including TLS'd connections, WebSockets, and HTTP tunneling.

Telemetry and Monitoring

Linkerd automatically collects metrics from all services that send traffic through it.

Traffic Split (canaries, blue/green deploys)

Linkerd can dynamically send a portion of traffic to different services.