Linkerd Production Readiness Pre-Launch Checklist

What actually bites teams in production

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Most Linkerd installs go fine. The problems show up later: the issuer cert expires, and nobody wrote down the rotation procedure.

Make it yours. Work through every item, check off as you go, before you push to production.

From Buoyant, creators of Linkerd. No spam.

Installation and GitOps: Helm config in Git, rollback procedure written down and tested (if you haven't tested it, it's not a procedure)
Certificates and identity: Trust anchor and issuer cert setup outside the CLI, cert-manager integration, documented rotation procedure for both
Control plane HA: High availability mode, resource requests and limits on every control plane pod, health monitoring over time
Proxy and workload tuning: High-traffic and stateful workloads (databases, Kafka, large monoliths), opaque ports, explicit gRPC configuration
Observability and alerts: Prometheus into Grafana, centralized log aggregation, a single incident dashboard, alerts for cert expiration before it pages you
Environment parity: Same Helm and GitOps workflow across dev, staging, and prod; at least one upgrade and one issuer rotation practiced in a lower environment before prod