Introduction to Service Mesh with Linkerd

The service mesh is an increasingly critical component of the cloud native ecosystem, with the Kubernetes ecosystem especially using service mesh projects to add reliability, security, and observability to applications. In this course, students will learn the basics of the service mesh and the benefits that it provides, and gain concrete, hands-on skills using Linkerd, the open source, ultralight CNCF service mesh for Kubernetes. Students will walk away with practical knowledge of an important cloud native technology which can be applied directly to any cloud native environment.

• Describe what a service mesh is and contrast it to related technologies
• Install a service mesh on Kubernetes using Linkerd
• Use a service mesh to transparently add mutual TLS (mTLS), golden metrics, and blue-green deploys to any Kubernetes application
• Understand the considerations when deploying a service mesh to production.

• Intermediate knowledge of Kubernetes is required
• Comfortable working in a Linux terminal and running a Kubernetes cluster
• Familiarity with building container images and running them in Kubernetes with kubectl