Linkerd Patterns
Production patterns for Linkerd service mesh - the lightweight, security-first service mesh for Kubernetes.
When to Use This Skill
- Setting up a lightweight service mesh
- Implementing automatic mTLS
- Configuring traffic splits for canary deployments
- Setting up service profiles for per-route metrics
- Implementing retries and timeouts
- Multi-cluster service mesh
Core Concepts
1. Linkerd Architecture
2. Key Resources
Templates
Template 1: Mesh Installation
Use a CLI version compatible with the target cluster. The example uses Homebrew; for other systems, follow the official installation guide.
Template 2: Inject Namespace
Template 3: Service Profile with Retries
Template 4: Traffic Split (Canary)
Template 5: Server Authorization Policy
Template 6: HTTPRoute for Advanced Routing
Template 7: Multi-cluster Setup
Monitoring Commands
Debugging
Best Practices
Do's
- Enable mTLS everywhere - It's automatic with Linkerd
- Use ServiceProfiles - Get per-route metrics and retries
- Set retry budgets - Prevent retry storms
- Monitor golden metrics - Success rate, latency, throughput
Don'ts
- Don't skip check - Always run
linkerd checkafter changes - Don't over-configure - Linkerd defaults are sensible
- Don't ignore ServiceProfiles - They unlock advanced features
- Don't forget timeouts - Set appropriate values per route


