KubeCon + CloudNativeCon London wrapped up a few weeks ago, and it was another fantastic event for Linkerd and the Buoyant team! With 15 Linkerd talks, Linkerd Day, and lots of opportunities to pick the brains of the maintainers, attendees had no shortage of Linkerd goodness. If you couldn’t join us in person or just want to relive the highlights, we’ve got you covered—here’s a recap and session recordings.

Linkerd Day and booth convos

Linkerd Day is a dedicated “Day Zero” conference that dives deep into all things Linkerd. With sessions by Linkerd users, Ambassadors, and community members, there were lots of great peer-to-peer learning opportunities. The conversations continued at our booth and the project pavilion kiosk, where we had many interesting discussions with end users. Connecting and hearing from folks using the project in production is always one of the conference highlights. During those conversations, a clear theme emerged: the power of zero-config mTLS and the need for operational simplicity strongly resonate. Especially the idea of taking full advantage of service mesh capabilities without hiring a dedicated team to manage it.

A community committed to Inclusivity

KubeCon wasn't just about technology; it was also a powerful testament to the strength and inclusivity of the cloud native community. The CNCF Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group, which I helped found and facilitate, had 7 talks, including the first solo keynote by a deaf signing member! Sandeep, one of the co-chairs, joined William Rizzo, Linkerd Ambassador and founding BIPOC Initiative member, and me at a theCUBE interview to discuss the importance of allyship. 

Catch up on Linkerd talks 

For those who couldn't attend every session or want to revisit key insights, we've compiled a list of the Linkerd talks. 

Lightning Talk: API management in the CRD world: What Linkerd has learned - Phil Henderson

Almost all CNCF projects using Kubernetes define their API with CRDs. This talk covers key lessons learned while developing Linkerd, focusing on the impact of shared CRDs like Gateway API for inter-project collaboration.

Scaling Progressive Delivery at EarnIn: Leveraging Linkerd for advanced deployments with gateway API - Kush Trivedi & Joe Brinkman, EarnIn 

EarnIn used Linkerd and Gateway API for advanced deployments, enabling Progressive Canary and Blue/Green rollouts. They migrated 600 microservices to Argo CD, using Linkerd for traffic management and GitOps integration, while empowering developers with a platform tool for canary deployment configurations.

Choosing a service mesh - Alex McMenemy & Dimple Thoomkuzhy, Compare the Market

Compare the Market engineers discuss their service mesh selection process, comparing Linkerd, Istio, Kuma, and App Mesh. They share how they evaluated each option based on mTLS, metrics, performance, time to production, support, and maintenance costs, ultimately choosing Linkerd.

Lightning Talk: Meshin’ with WebAssembly: Taking Linkerd beyond containers - Joonas Bergius, Cosmonic

In this session, Joonas explores integrating Linkerd and WasmCloud to extend Linkerd to support WebAssembly workloads, enabling secure and observable server-side WebAssembly deployments without disrupting existing tooling investments.

The future of Linkerd: 2.18 and beyond - William Morgan, Buoyant

Linkerd's creator, William Morgan, discusses the future of Linkerd, highlighting upcoming innovations to streamline Kubernetes workflows, enhance reliability, and maintain simplicity. The talk provides a preview of Linkerd's roadmap for 2025 and beyond.

Abstracting multi-cluster topologies with CAPI and Linkerd for internal developer platforms - William Rizzo, Mirantis

In this session, Will shows how Cluster-API (CAPI) and Linkerd simplify multi-cluster topologies for Internal Developer Platforms (IDP). By combining CAPI's cluster management with Linkerd’s cross-cluster service communication, platform teams can offer developers a streamlined experience, letting them focus on application deployment rather than infrastructure.

Lightning Talk: Upgrading Linkerd with Flux - James Johnstone & Haydn Stokes, Compare the Market

Compare the Market discusses upgrading Linkerd from 2.14.10 to 2.16.0 using Flux, highlighting the challenges and lessons learned. They share their experience navigating breaking changes and version jumps while keeping secrets out of Git, including the 13 experiments needed for a successful upgrade.

Benchmarking journey through service meshes - Dominik Táskai, Adesso Hungary

Service meshes are critical for secure and reliable communication in cloud native environments, but their performance varies. This session dives into benchmarking service meshes like Linkerd and Istio, exploring what makes them fast and production-ready, and verifying whether their performance claims are accurate.

The great sidecar debate - William Morgan, Buoyant

In his talk, William addresses the debate around sidecars in service meshes, considering recent Kubernetes support and the rise of ambient and eBPF approaches. He examines the tradeoffs of sidecars, assessing their value, resource consumption, operational impacts, and security considerations to provide an unbiased comparison of different approaches.

Museum of weird bugs: Our favorites from 8 years of service mesh debugging - Alex Leong, Buoyant

In "Museum of Weird Bugs," Alex shares interesting, weird, and memorable Linkerd bugs fixed over 8 years. She discusses bug manifestations, troubleshooting approaches, and the process of resolution, including educating users on effective bug reporting.

Linkerd update: Gateway API, client-specific policy, Federated Services, multicluster, Rust, & more! - Alex Leong, Buoyant

Alex provides a project update on the latest developments and upcoming features, including Gateway API, client-specific policies, Federated Services, and multicluster UX improvements.

Leaving KubeCon EU 2025, we're energized by the strong momentum behind Linkerd and incredibly proud of the dedication and contributions of our team and the wider community. The focus on keeping service meshes simple and the commitment to fostering an inclusive environment are inspiring.