The Future of Linkerd: 2.18 and Beyond
Talkat Linkerd Day Europe 2025 · on Tuesday, 2025-04-01· at 15:20· Level 3 | ICC Capital Suite 14-16·
summary
Linkerd explains concrete changes: protocol detection historically reads first bytes and times out (commonly 10s), opaque ports (introduced in 2.10) avoid those delays by forcing TCP, and 2.18 adds protocol declarations using the Kubernetes appProtocol field plus ALPN between proxies so one proxy can tell another the detected protocol. New metrics surface detection failures under load, reducing sporadic auth and routing denials and making behavior predictable for high‑capacity clusters.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Linkerd's future
- 1:03Linkerd's evolution 2016-2022
- 3:29Complexity vs simplicity
- 5:37Operational simplicity principles
- 8:03Protocol detection challenges
- 13:20Automated protocol detection
- 15:48Opaque ports limitations
- 18:55HTTP failures under load
- 19:55Protocol declarations 2.18
- 22:01Future: operational simplicity
- 23:48Q&A
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