Happiness Guaranteed with gRPC & Linkerd!

Thursday, September 17, 2026

9 am PT | 12 pm ET | 6 pm CET

Working at Buoyant isn’t always smiles, or is it? Buoyant Tech Evangelists Sarah and Flynn will be fighting an unruly demo that shows health with emojis. By leveraging the powers of gRPC load balancing, retries, timeouts, and routing - these two will turn those frowns upside down! As you watch this Service Mesh Academy unravel you’ll learn how to optimize communication within your cluster by avoiding gRPC requests being pinned to one pod, optimizing your requests routing, and defining failover and resiliency within your clusters.

What you'll get out of this

You’ll leave with the takeaways on how to enhance gRPC traffic within your cluster, avoiding late night pages - and hopefully will get a couple of laughs!

Getting Ready

Eyes and Ears! No hand-on workshop this time.

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Speakers

Sarah Christoff

Tech Evangelist

Sarah is a tech evangelist at Buoyant who loves making complex concepts more digestible. She is the self-proclaimed founder of the Leslie Lamport fan club. When she's not writing or streaming, she is running her animal rescue and competing in triathlons. She believes code should be like cats: intelligent, fluffy, and easy to take care of.

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.