Linkerd Service Mesh

aid: buoyant:linkerd
name: Linkerd Service Mesh
description: Linkerd is a CNCF-graduated service mesh for Kubernetes that transparently adds mutual TLS
  encryption, latency-aware load balancing, retries, timeouts, circuit breaking, and observability to
  any Kubernetes workload without code changes. Supports HTTP, HTTP/2, gRPC, and TCP traffic.
humanURL: https://linkerd.io/
tags:
- Kubernetes
- mTLS
- Observability
- Service Mesh
- Zero Trust
properties:
- type: Documentation
  url: https://linkerd.io/2.x/overview/
- type: Website
  url: https://linkerd.io/
- type: Reference
  url: https://linkerd.io/2.x/reference/
- type: GitHubRepository
  url: https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2
x-features:
- Mutual TLS for transparent encryption and authentication
- Cryptographic workload identity
- Latency-aware load balancing
- Automated retries, timeouts, and circuit breaking
- Zone-aware routing (HAZL) to reduce cross-zone costs
- Canary and blue-green deployment support
- AI/LLM observability for resource, tool, and prompt usage metrics
- Multi-cluster failover
- FIPS 140-2/140-3 validated encryption (Enterprise)
x-use-cases:
- Zero-trust Kubernetes networking
- Service-to-service mutual TLS without code changes
- Observability for microservices and AI workloads
- Multi-cluster Kubernetes deployments
- Migration between cloud providers