A deep dive into Kubernetes mTLS with Linkerd

Thursday, December 15, 2022

9 PST | 12 pm EST | 6 pm CET

Mutual TLS (mTLS) is a hot topic in the Kubernetes world, especially for anyone tasked with getting “encryption in transit” for their applications. But what is it and how does it compare to alternatives such as encryption at the CNI level? In this workshop, we give you a solid understanding of what mTLS is, how it works, and how it compares to alternatives. We discuss workload identity, trust chains, and certificates, and walk you through a hands-on tutorial on how to set up, monitor, and understand mTLS between your services on a Kubernetes cluster with Linkerd.

What to expect

You'll understand:

What mTLS is and how it secures communications, including how certificates work
How Linkerd manages workload identity and communications using mTLS
How to set up and monitor mTLS in Linkerd

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Speakers

Flynn

Linkerd Evangelist, Buoyant

Flynn is a tech evangelist at Buoyant, where he works on spreading the good word about Linkerd — the graduated CNCF service mesh that makes the fundamental tools for software security and reliability freely available to every engineer — and about Kubernetes and cloud-native development in general. Flynn is also the original author and a maintainer of the Emissary-ingress API gateway, also a CNCF project. Flynn's career in computing spans nearly forty years and runs the gamut from bringup on bare metal to distributed applications, with a common thread of communications and security throughout. He has spoken about Linkerd, Emissary-ingress, and other cloud native technologies at several conferences, including KubeCon/CloudNativeCon, DevOps Days, and the NYC Kubernetes meetup.