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This article introduces why you choose to use Linkerd instead of Isito. The content is very detailed. Interested friends can use it for reference. I hope it will be helpful to you.

I'd like to focus on Linkerd, a service grid hosted by the CNCF Foundation that is known for its simplicity. In a service grid environment, the "less-is-more" approach used by Linkerd and the use of Rust-based "micro-agents" at the data plane layer are unique. The Linkerd website lists many cases where organizations run it in a production environment, so I set out to talk to some of these users and listen to their experiences.

Simplicity of Linkerd

As the most well-known service grid, we first tried Istio. However, they soon found that Istio was too complex and challenging in many ways.

Sudia recalled that Istio needed to install multiple Helm chart and required various manual steps to deploy it to the cluster. This process takes a day, which is a big drawback for Sudia and his small Ops team. Because they don't have time to "manage" service grid tools. He also notes that Istio has recently taken some steps to simplify its architecture and make it simpler.

Andersen first tried to install Istio on the Kubernetes cluster, but failed. He had to rebuild it from scratch. After finally successfully installing Istio, he felt that the metrics provided by Istio were not unique. The user interface also seems to be out of date, and he has almost given up the idea of using the service grid entirely.

By chance, two people found Linkerd. They liked the simplicity of Linkerd and decided to try.

Andersen he installed Linkerd on the development cluster, and to his surprise, the first instance was up and running with just one command. He adds Linkerd proxies to the Kubernetes namespace and can see traffic and communication between services within minutes.

Sudia's experience is similar. Sudia and his team found that Linkerd is intuitive and easy to use and can be installed from the command line in minutes.

In terms of service grid, you have a lot of options. The complexity of Istio may be due to the functionality it provides. Although Linkerd takes a minimalist approach that simplifies a lot of work, in some use cases, using Istio makes more sense, and we know that there are many happy Istio users. But we can't ignore all the complaints about its complexity.

Visualization of Linkerd

The main motivation for Sudia and Andersen to adopt a service grid is to achieve observability in inter-service communication. Linkerd not only provides the right metrics, but also visualizes them.

According to Sudia, the dashboard is one of the best parts of Linkerd. You can view key metrics such as request rate, error rate, request duration, and total response without other settings. And because the user interface is so intuitive, he doesn't even need special learning and training. From the second day of installation and deployment, the team was able to accurately troubleshoot the problem.

Andersen found that the "Tap" function of Linkerd tracks requests between services. It is especially convenient for him to see what is happening in real time without any additional settings.

Observability of Linkerd

For Sudia and Andersen, the highest requirement of a service grid is to be able to observe the communication between services in a distributed application. This not only benefits the operation and maintenance team, but also makes life easier for developers and QA personnel.

Sudia says Linkerd does not need to set tools for the most common metrics because it provides key RED (rate, error, duration) metrics by default.

Andersen sees one of the benefits of Linkerd when running QA tasks, and the ability to measure load after software deployment is particularly useful, greatly improving debugging and troubleshooting capabilities. Also, Linkerd's tracking feature is also very useful.

Security of Linkerd

Security is a key task for software and must support all other decisions. Therefore, this is a top priority for both Sudia and Andersen. Both try to manage security certificates through mTLS in the service grid to encrypt the traffic within the cluster.

Sudia's team typically uses the Certificate Manager to publish Letsencrypt certificates and needs to rotate them every 24 hours. He wants to avoid implementing complex RBAC policies on a per-container basis, like Istio.

For a smaller team, the ability to quickly create a highly secure cluster using mTLS is critical. Sudia's team spent about 30 minutes setting up mTLS, most of which was spent reading documents. Dave points out that this easy-to-use level setting mTLS is very powerful, especially for small teams like him.

Andersen's team needs mTLS to route traffic securely between Linkerd grid clusters. Linkerd provides the ability to generate certificates automatically, which is very convenient.

Community and support of Linkerd

Whenever Andersen or Sudia encounters a problem, they find the Linkerd community very helpful and able to solve the problem quickly.

On one occasion, Andersen had trouble using a HTTP session with Linkerd. On Linkerd Slack, with the help of the community, he quickly found a solution and solved it in a day. To his delight, this problem was fixed in the next release of Linkerd.

Sudia says that when his team needs help, he can find a solution in Linkerd Slack's community in almost a day. He especially likes Linkerd's concise documentation, which is a problem that Istio has been trying to solve.

In addition to Linkerd,Sudia and Andersen, monitoring data is accessed from multiple sources, including Prometheus,Grafana Cloud,Elasticsearch,Rancher,Datadog,Jaeger and SumoLogic. Although they have different combinations of monitoring tools, they are both integrating all monitoring metrics into one tool to get a unified view of all metrics, logs, and traces.

About why you choose to use Linkerd instead of Isito to share here, I hope the above content can be of some help to you, you can learn more knowledge. If you think the article is good, you can share it for more people to see.

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