CNCF-hosted Co-located Events Europe 2025

At Earnin, we transformed our deployment processes by migrating nearly 600 microservices to Argo CD. The cornerstone of this transformation was our adoption of Linkerd as our service mesh, which helped enabled us to implement Progressive Canary and Blue/Green rollouts within our infrastructure.

In this talk, We'll share how Linkerd became the catalyst for our advanced deployment strategies. We'll deep dive into how we utilized Linkerd's seamless integration with the Gateway API to achieve traffic shifting and mirroring, to help us integrate with Argo Rollouts in GitOps way. Core to our success was developing a platform tool that empowers developers to easily configure their own canary deployment parameters.

Choosing a service mesh can be a daunting task. While the modern meshes aren't interchangeable, they do generally offer the same broad table-stakes features to add security, reliability, and observability to applications. There are very important differences, though! and it can be very tricky indeed to work out a sane way to evaluate multiple meshes to make this critical decision.

Compare the Market had to tackle this issue recently, deciding between Linkerd, Istio, Kuma Mesh, and App Mesh. In this session, you'll join the engineers responsible for recommending a mesh to learn how they went about making their decision, starting with their primary use case of mTLS and metrics, continuing into performance and time to production, finishing with how they viewed support and maintenance costs and how they balanced wants and needs when making their decision (Linkerd, of course!).

Much in the same way that Service Meshes have (as originally pioneered by Linkerd) accomplished for seamlessly connecting, observing and securing service-to-service communication between applications deployed in containers, WebAssembly on the server side is looking to revolutionize the way we think about and enable application development and delivery of the future.

This session explores our efforts to bring together the two cutting edge CNCF projects, Linkerd and wasmCloud, to enable end-users to expand their mesh to service an entirely new class of workload in the form of WebAssembly without having to leave their existing investments in tooling behind.

Based on the content, you will leave this talk with the understanding of how you can extend your Linkerd deployments to support WebAssembly workloads in order to leverage the emerging paradigm on the server-side without compromising on security or observability.

What does the future hold for Linkerd, the world’s lightest, fastest, and simplest service mesh? Come find out in this session with Linkerd’s creator Oliver Gould! Linkerd is moving faster now than ever before, and though we are absolutely holding true to Linkerd’s guiding principles of simplicity, security, and speed, there are a lot of exciting things on the roadmap to discuss

Learn how upcoming innovations in Linkerd will help teams streamline Kubernetes workflows, achieve unparalleled reliability, and embrace simplicity without compromise. From refinements and bugfixes to major new features, this talk will provide a sneak peek into what Linkerd is building to help ease your cloud-native journey in 2025 and beyond. Don't miss this chance to hear directly from Linkerd's creator and engage in the conversation about what’s next for the service mesh that started it all.

As organizations scale their Kubernetes adoption, multi-cluster architectures are becoming the backbone of resilience, scalability, and compliance. However, building a unified developer experience across these clusters while abstracting operational complexities is a significant challenge.
In this session we’ll demonstrate how Cluster-API (CAPI), a declarative tool for Kubernetes lifecycle management and Linkerd, the powerful yet lightweight service mesh, can work together to simplify multi-cluster topologies for Internal Developer Platforms (IDP). By combining CAPI's robust cluster management with Linkerd’s seamless cross-cluster service communication, platform teams can deliver a streamlined and intuitive experience for developers, enabling them to focus on building and deploying applications without worrying about underlying infrastructure.

Multicluster Kubernetes is becoming more and more common. Unfortunately, while it brings fascinating new opportunities to the table, fairly simple things like resilience and progressive delivery often become dramatically more complex when they need to span multiple clusters.
Federated services are a new Linkerd feature aimed at providing operational simplicity for multicluster. A federated service appears exactly the same from anywhere in your multicluster setup, while being able to reach everywhere in your multicluster setup, and Linkerd pushes the work of making that happen deep into the mesh so that the users of the mesh needn’t think about it: traffic will stay local where it can, route seamlessly across clusters where it can’t, and routing primitives just work as you expect. Join us for a deep dive into what federated services are, how they work, and how to use them, and a live demo of what they can do!

Flux is a great GitOps tool, and like any great GitOps tool, it can handle in-place upgrades without breaking a sweat – but things can be different when across breaking changes, and especially when jumping by two major versions at once! That's the situation that Compare the Market faced in 2024: going from Linkerd 2.14.10 to Linkerd 2.16.0 in a single step using Flux... all while keeping secrets out of Git.

In this session, you'll get a good look behind the curtain at what the upgrade involved, what went well, and what caused some pain. You'll hear about where the documentation fell short, where the gotchas were lurking, and why it took 13 experiments with ephemeral clusters to get to the point that the platform engineers were able to pull the trigger one evening, and have a quiet morning at work the next day!

Service meshes have become an essential part of cloud-native infrastructures around the world, managing secure, reliable communication between services serving healthcare systems, financial data, real-time analytics platforms, and global e-commerce applications. But not all service meshes are created equal and as service meshes promise low latency, minimal overhead, and robust reliability, are these claims always true to their word?

Benchmarking service meshes like Linkerd, Istio, and others can reveal key differences between them due to the impact of technological and design choices. But creating fair, reproducible benchmarks requires careful setup and a deep understanding of both the workloads and the mesh technologies themselves.

Join Dominik for a deep dive into the art and science of benchmarking service meshes. We’ll uncover insights into what makes a service mesh fast, lightweight, and production-ready and whether the promises that each make really hold up.