Linkerd 2 Developers Workshop 2022

Master service mesh concepts and get hands-on experience with blue-green deploys, adding retries, visibility, and more

What you'll learn

Learn why Linkerd is a great service mesh

Add your application to the Linkerd service mesh

Configure retries using Linkerd ServiceProfiles

Use Linkerd to conduct a blue-green deployment

Requirements

Basic Containerization and Kubernetes knowledge

Basic REST API knowledge

Minimum Recommended Hardware: 4 logical CPUs, 10GB RAM, 50GB storage

Description

This course has everything you need to take advantage of the powerful Linkerd service mesh. You will learn the core concepts needed to understand how Linkerd integrates with your application. Then, you'll learn how and why to enable the advanced features of Linkerd. For each section, you'll get hands-on exercises to reinforce your new skills.Learn the Service MeshLinkerd is a service mesh, which means that it allows you to manage and configure the network traffic in your application. Linkerd is a Cloud-Native tool that works inside a Kubernetes environment to create the service mesh.ObservabilityA major advantage of Linkerd is the observability feature. Linkerd provides the golden signals (success rate, latency, traffic) in a convenient dashboard or on the command line. In large microservices environments with lots of dependencies, it can be hard to find the root cause of errors in your service. Linkerd helps you to identify root cause by giving you success rates for all resources with linkerd enabled. Linkerd also allows you to configure traffic for the applications in your service mesh. You can add retries and timeouts using linkerd. These linkerd features allow you to increase the reliability of your system. If an incoming request results in an intermittent error, Linkerd's retries can automatically retry the request so that your user just sees a successful response.Rust-based for speed and securityLinkerd's sidecar proxy is written in the Rust programming language for a couple reasons. First, Rust makes Linkerd *fast*. Linkerd sidecar proxies are faster than other service meshes in the market. This means that Linkerd is cheaper to run and a better experience for your users than other meshes.Second, Rust makes Linkerd memory-efficient. When you are paying your cloud provider per GB of RAM used, it's best to go with the most efficient service mesh.Third, Linkerd sidecar proxies are not vulnerable to C-style memory vulnerabilities due to the safety guarantees of Rust. This means fewer work injects to update the proxy due to memory security issues such as Heartbleed.Easy Deployment and UpdatesTo add Linkerd to your application, you add a single Kubernetes resource annotation. If Linkerd is running on your cluster, it will automatically add the required configuration data so that your application is enabled for linkerd. Linkerd runs as a sidecar along your application. That means that Linkerd works with any application programming language. The sideecar pattern also means that you can update linkerd without impacting your main application container processes. Advanced Deployment StrategiesLinkerd supports a Kubernetes Custom Resource Definition type called Traffic Splits that enables advanced functionality for distributing traffic to different backends. You can use it to implement canary deployments such as the Blue-Green deployment with Linkerd. You can also perform advanced techniques such as fault injection using the Linkerd TrafficSplit resource.

Overview

Section 1: Introduction

Lecture 1 Why Linkerd?

Lecture 2 Linkerd Performance

Lecture 3 Linkerd Architecture Overview

Lecture 4 Control Plane Components

Lecture 5 Course Contents

Section 2: Installation

Lecture 6 Installation Section Overview

Lecture 7 Install Guide

Lecture 8 Install Docker Desktop - macOS

Lecture 9 Install Docker Desktop - Windows Hyper-V

Lecture 10 Install Docker Desktop - Windows WSL

Lecture 11 Resource Recommendations

Lecture 12 Enable Kubernetes - All OS

Lecture 13 Install Linkerd - macOS

Lecture 14 Install Linkerd - Windows

Lecture 15 Install Viz - All OS

Lecture 16 Download Git Repository - All OS

Lecture 17 Load Haystack Image - All OS

Section 3: Meshing

Lecture 18 Meshing Section Overview

Lecture 19 Linkerd Sidecar Injection

Lecture 20 Linkerd's AdmissionController

Lecture 21 Kubernetes Annotations

Lecture 22 Add Annotations with kubectl edit

Lecture 23 Add annotations with linkerd inject

Lecture 24 Lab: Meshing an application

Lecture 25 Lab Walkthrough: Meshing an application

Section 4: Visualization

Lecture 26 Visualization Section Overview

Lecture 27 Navigating the Viz dashboard

Lecture 28 Linkerd Viz Stat

Lecture 29 Linkerd Viz Edges

Lecture 30 Linkerd viz top

Lecture 31 Linkerd viz tap

Lecture 32 Lab: Finding Errors

Lecture 33 Lab walkthrough: Finding Errors

Section 5: ServiceProfile

Lecture 34 ServiceProfile Section Introduction

Lecture 35 ServiceProfile definitions

Lecture 36 Creating ServiceProfiles

Lecture 37 ServiceProfile templates

Lecture 38 linkerd profile –open-api

Lecture 39 linkerd viz profile –tap

Lecture 40 ServiceProfile Retries

Lecture 41 Applying ServiceProfiles

Lecture 42 Lab: Implementing Retries

Lecture 43 Lab Walkthrough: Retries

Section 6: TrafficSplit

Lecture 44 Section Introduction

Lecture 45 Blue-Green Overview

Lecture 46 TrafficSplit CRD

Lecture 47 Creating a TrafficSplit

Lecture 48 Implementing Blue Green Deployment

Lecture 49 Lab: Blue-Green Deploy 1

Lecture 50 Lab: Blue-Green Deploy 2

Lecture 51 Lab Walkthrough: Blue-Green Deploy

Software developers or maintainers who want to use Linkerd with their applications,Anyone who wants to get an understanding of how Linkerd works