How to add a lightweight service mesh with Linkerd

A lightweight service mesh with Linkerd

Linkerd is a small, fast service mesh focused on simplicity. It injects a Rust-based micro-proxy that provides automatic mTLS, retries, and golden metrics (success rate, requests per second, and latency) with minimal configuration and overhead.

Prerequisites

• A Kubernetes cluster.
• The linkerd CLI installed locally.

Steps

1. Run linkerd check

Validate the cluster is ready:

linkerd check --pre

2. Install the control plane

linkerd install --crds | kubectl apply -f -
linkerd install | kubectl apply -f -
linkerd check

3. Mesh a workload

Inject the proxy into an existing Deployment:

kubectl get deploy myapp -o yaml | linkerd inject - | kubectl apply -f -

Or add the annotation linkerd.io/inject: enabled to the namespace or pod template.

4. Install the viz extension

linkerd viz install | kubectl apply -f -
linkerd viz check

5. View live traffic metrics

linkerd viz stat deploy -n default
linkerd viz dashboard

The dashboard shows success rate, RPS, and latency per service.

6. Confirm automatic mTLS

linkerd viz edges deploy -n default

The SECURED column confirms connections are encrypted with mTLS by default.

Verification

Run linkerd check and confirm all checks pass. Confirm meshed pods have an added linkerd-proxy container. Generate traffic and watch linkerd viz stat report a healthy success rate, and confirm edges shows secured connections.

Next Steps

Add service profiles to define per-route metrics and retries, set up traffic splitting for canary releases, and export Linkerd metrics to Prometheus and Grafana for long-term dashboards and alerting.