Getting Started with Linkerd

Learn how to set up and use Linkerd, a lightweight service mesh for Kubernetes, to enhance your microservices architecture.

Now that we have a Kubernetes cluster and Meshery, we are ready to download and deploy Linkerd resources.

Using Meshery, select Linkerd from the Management menu.

step1

In the Linkerd management page:

  • Type linkerd into the namespace field.
  • Click the (+) icon on the Install card and select Latest Linkerd to install the latest version of Linkerd.

step2

Perform the below steps if the above steps doesn’t work for you.

On a *nix system, you can setup linkerd by doing the following:

The above command will get the latest Linkerd package and untar it in the same folder.

Change into the Linkerd package directory and add the linkerd client to your PATH environment variable.

curl -sL https://run.linkerd.io/install | sh
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.linkerd2/bin

Alternatively, on MacOS you can sue HomeBrew to install linkerd

brew install linkerd

To verify linkerd is setup lets try to print out the command help

linkerd version

We can use a new feature in linkerd to check if the cluster is ready for install:

linkerd check --pre

Install Linkerd: Deploy Linkerd custom resources:

linkerd install | kubectl apply -f -

Linkerd is deployed in the linkerd Kubernetes namespace. Verify that Linkerd and its components are deployed, execute the command:

linkerd check

Enforce mTLS strict mode By establishing mutually-authenticated connections between Linkerd proxies , Linkerd automatically enables mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) by default for most HTTP-based communication between services.

Linkerd, as part of this workshop, is installed with several optional addons like:

You will use Meshery for collecting and viewing metrics, and Jaeger for viewing distributed traces.

Quiz