Running Linkerd on Amazon EKS

Thursday, February 12, 2026

9 am PT | 12 pm ET | 6 pm CET

Linkerd brings security, reliability, and observability to Kubernetes, but of course there are different kinds of Kubernetes clusters and a vast ecosystem of other projects and capabilities that Linkerd interoperates with. In this Service Mesh Academy, we’ll be taking an in-depth look at running Linkerd on EKS, with special attention to the CNI, AWS Private CA, and more!

What you'll get out of this

Learn about the unique capabilities EKS brings to Linkerd
Understand what challenges there are with Linkerd on EKS and how to tackle them
Know how Linkerd improves real-world readiness on EKS

Getting Ready

This is a hands-on workshop, so it's important that you arrive prepared with a Kubernetes cluster (pretty much any kind will do!) and the Linkerd CLIs installed on your machine! We'll use Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd version 2.18, but Linkerd edge releases starting with edge-25.4.4 will work just fine, too. Check out the BEL Getting Started Guide for specific instructions on how to set that up. (As always, if you don’t want to do the hands-on portion, you are welcome to just listen in. But it won’t be as fun!)

Speakers

Ivan Porta

Customer Success Engineer

Ivan Porta is a Customer Success Engineer at Buoyant with a global perspective shaped by his experience working across Italy, the UK, Australia, and South Korea. Driven by a lifelong passion for technology and backed by advanced certifications from institutions like Stanford and MIT, Ivan has spent his career solving complex problems for high-profile clients such as Microsoft and Barclays. Beyond his day job, he is a dedicated contributor to the dev community—sharing his expertise through keynote speeches, live workshops, and technical writing on everything from Azure to DevOps best practices.