instruction: How do you deploy and configure Linkerd service mesh?
output: Overview | Linkerd Docs Community Get Involved Adopters & Case Studies Linkerd Ambassadors Become an Ambassador Buoyant's Linkerd Forum Blog FAQ Enterprise Star Join Forum Announcing Linkerd 2.18: Battlescars, lessons learned, and preliminary Windows support Learn more You are viewing docs for an older version of Linkerd. You may want the latest documentation for this page instead. Linkerd edge Linkerd 2.18 Linkerd 2.17 Linkerd 2.16 Linkerd 2.15 Linkerd 2.14 Linkerd 2.13 Linkerd 2.12 Linkerd 2.11 Linkerd 2.10 Overview Getting Started Features HTTP, HTTP/2, and gRPC Proxying TCP Proxying and Protocol Detection Retries and Timeouts Automatic mTLS Ingress Telemetry and Monitoring Load Balancing Authorization Policy Automatic Proxy Injection CNI Plugin Dashboard and on-cluster metrics stack Distributed Tracing Fault Injection High Availability HTTP Access Logging Multi-cluster communication Proxy Init Iptables Modes Service Profiles Topology Aware Routing Traffic Split (canaries, blue/green deploys) Tasks Adding your services to Linkerd Automated Canary Releases Automatic Multicluster Failover Automatically Rotating Control Plane TLS Credentials Automatically Rotating Webhook TLS Credentials Bringing your own Prometheus Configuring Per-Route Policy Configuring Proxy Concurrency Configuring Retries Configuring Timeouts Control Plane Debug Endpoints Customizing Linkerd's Configuration with Kustomize Debugging 502s Debugging gRPC applications with request tracing Debugging HTTP applications with per-route metrics Distributed tracing with Linkerd Enabling Topology Aware Routing Exporting Metrics Exposing the Dashboard Generating your own mTLS root certificates Getting Per-Route Metrics Getting started with Linkerd SMI extension Graceful Pod Shutdown Grafana Ingress traffic Injecting Faults Installing Linkerd Installing Linkerd with Helm Installing Multi-cluster Components Linkerd and Pod Security Policies (PSP) Manually Rotating Control Plane TLS Credentials Modifying the Proxy Log Level Multi-cluster communication Multi-cluster communication with StatefulSets Replacing expired certificates Restricting Access To Services Rotating webhooks certificates Securing Linkerd Tap Setting Up Service Profiles Troubleshooting Uninstalling Linkerd Uninstalling Multicluster Upgrading Linkerd Using a Custom Cluster Domain Using A Private Docker Repository Using extensions Using GitOps with Linkerd with Argo CD Using the Debug Sidecar Validating your mTLS traffic Reference Architecture Authorization Policy CLI authz check completion diagnostics identity inject install install-cni jaeger multicluster profile uninject uninstall upgrade version viz Cluster Configuration Extensions List Helm Chart Version Matrix IPTables Reference Proxy Configuration Proxy Log Level Proxy Metrics Service Profiles What is a service mesh? Frequently Asked Questions Releases and Versions Design Principles Going to Production Service Mesh Glossary Overview Linkerd is a service mesh for Kubernetes. It makes running services easier and safer by giving you runtime debugging, observability, reliability, and security—all without requiring any changes to your code. For a brief introduction to the service mesh model, we recommend reading The Service Mesh: What Every Software Engineer Needs to Know about the World&rsquo;s Most Over-Hyped Technology . Linkerd is fully open source, licensed under Apache v2 , and is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation graduated project. Linkerd is developed in the open in the Linkerd GitHub organization . Linkerd has two basic components: a control plane and a data plane . Once Linkerd&rsquo;s control plane has been installed on your Kubernetes cluster, you add the data plane to your workloads (called &ldquo;meshing&rdquo; or &ldquo;injecting&rdquo; your workloads) and voila! Service mesh magic happens. You can get started with Linkerd in minutes! How it works Linkerd works by installing a set of ultralight, transparent &ldquo;micro-proxies&rdquo; next to each service instance. These proxies automatically handle all traffic to and from the service. Because they&rsquo;re transparent, these proxies act as highly instrumented out-of-process network stacks, sending telemetry to, and receiving control signals from, the control plane. This design allows Linkerd to measure and manipulate traffic to and from your service without introducing excessive latency. In order to be as small, lightweight, and safe as possible, Linkerd&rsquo;s micro-proxies are written in Rust and specialized for Linkerd. You can learn more about these micro-proxies in our blog post, Under the hood of Linkerd&rsquo;s state-of-the-art Rust proxy, Linkerd2-proxy , (If you want to know why Linkerd doesn&rsquo;t use Envoy, you can learn why in our blog post, Why Linkerd doesn&rsquo;t use Envoy .) Next steps Get started with Linkerd in minutes, or check out the architecture for more details on Linkerd&rsquo;s components and how they all fit together. Linkerd was originally created by Buoyant View Code of Conduct Community GitHub Slack Linkerd Forum Follow Linkedin YouTube Twitter Edit This Site Copyright © 2025 Linkerd Authors. All rights reserved.