| Linkerd 2.18 Adds Protocol Declarations |
| Wednesday, 23 April 2025 |
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Version 2.18 of the Linkerd service mesh has added features aimed at making the software better at handling problematic situations, along with an experimental build of the proxy for Windows environments. Linkerd can be used to add security, reliability, and observability features to cloud native applications, particularly those that use Kubernetes. Linkerd, the open source service mesh originally created by Bouyant, works by transparently inserting its functionality at the platform layer rather than the application layer.
The new release has the focus "battlescars", and the developers have added features and updated functionality to reduce "operational pain in response to real life". In practical terms this means three changes making it easier to run Linkerd at the boundaries of scale: protocol declarations, GitOps-compatible multicluster, and changes to Gateway API support. The new protocol declarations add to Linkerd's existing protocol detection. Linkerd has until now automatically detected the protocols used by applications rather than requiring the user to configure them. This has been baed on the data passed through the proxy, meaning users can begin using Linkerd without configuration and expect their applications to continue to work. The new protocol declaration offers an alternative in extreme situations where more information is required. Linkerd 2.18 will now optionally read the protocol for a port from the appProto field on Kubernetes Service objects. When this field is specified, Linkerd will not perform protocol detection and instead just use the configured protocol. The new release also adds GitOps-compatible multicluster linking. Linkerd lets applications communicate between Kubernetes clusters securely and transparently to the application, even across the open Internet. The developers say organizations using Linkerd sometimes run it on hundreds or thousands of clusters, and will typically manage their infrastructure via GitOps. Pod-to-pod multicluster for platforms with flat networks was first added in Linkerd 2.14, and improved in 2.17 with federated services, a new model for services that span many clusters. In Linkerd 2.18, this has been further expanded with the ability to create of all Link resources in a declarative fashion, making it fully GitOps-compatible. A third improvement in this release is support for Gateway API decoupling. Linkerd uses the Gateway API as a core configuration mechanism, but until now has bundled the Gateway API types for completeness. This will be the last release that installs Gateway API types by default, and will in future provide recommendations of how to manage the Gateway API across Linkerd and other projects. This release increases the installed versions of these types, and adds support for Gateway API version 1.2.1, the latest available. Finally, this release has an experimental build of the proxy for Windows machines, and the team says this is a critical first step in Linkerd's path to full Window support. Linkerd 2.18 is available now. More InformationRelated ArticlesLinkerd Adds Egress And Rate Limiting Exposing the Kubernetes Dashboard with Istio Service Mesh Kubernetes on Edge Training From Linux Foundation & CNCF Open Service Mesh To Join Cloud Native Computing Foundation To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. 
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