Linkerd 2.13 release debuts free, automated health checks and more

Service mesh startup Bouyant Inc. announced a new release of Linkerd today that brings new features including automated health monitoring, dynamic request routing based on the Kubernetes Gateway application programming interface, circuit breaking for overloaded services and more.

Today’s release comes a week before the first-ever Linkerd Day conference, which will be held in Amsterdam on April 18.

The Linkerd service mesh is a software layer that provides connectivity for microservices, which are the components of modern, container-based applications. Containerized apps are popular because they’re lightweight and can easily be moved between different kinds of computing infrastructure without making any changes to the code.

Linkerd creates an abstraction layer across networking environments, making it easier for developers to deploy distributed applications within them. It automatically routes application traffic across multiple network underlays and eliminates the need to configure each application service for a specific network.

With the 2.13 release, available via a new installer, users gain free and fully automated health monitoring and vulnerability reporting for every Linkerd cluster through the Buoyant Cloud software-as-a-service automation platform.

“We’re launching free automated health monitoring, vulnerability alerts and upgrade assistance for any Linkerd cluster in the world with Buoyant Cloud,” said William Morgan, chief executive officer of Buoyant and one of the creators of Linkerd. “This means that any Linkerd adopter in the world can ensure their Linkerd deployment itself is healthy, secure and up-to-date — a critical part of delivering the security and reliability guarantees that Linkerd itself provides.”

Also new is dynamic request routing, a new feature that provides fine-grain control over the routing of individual HTTP and gRPC requests. Through this, users can unlock new capabilities around sticky sessions, user-based A/B testing and canary deployments, plus dynamic staging environments, Buoyant said.

The dynamic request routing feature is based on the new Kubernetes Gateway API, which has been adopted by Linkerd as its core configuration mechanism. This is also said to be a big move that eliminates much of the complexity around the configuration of Linkerd.

Yet another new capability is circuit breaking, which gives users the ability to dynamically cut off traffic to failing endpoints so they can recover. The 2.13 release makes it possible to mark specific services as eligible for circuit breaking. Then, meshed clients will automatically reduce traffic if those services start returning errors, the company said.

As a final update, the 2.13 release is available in a Federal Information Processing Standards-compatible format for users who need to comply with the FIPS-140-2 and FIPS-140-3 standards. It’s also being made available through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace for the first time.

Morgan appeared on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in May, when he discussed his focus on simplifying Linkerd and enhancing its security:

Image: Linkerd