The maintainers of Linkerd has announced the release of Linkerd 2.10. The latest version extends the maintainers’ dedication to minimalism, composability, and building on top of the existing ecosystem, introducing new opt-in extensions that pare down Linkerd’s default control plane install and allow for third-party augmentation.

This release also extends Linkerd’s secure multi-cluster support to all TCP connections, and adds opaque ports to make it easier to apply mTLS to all protocols. Linkerd 2.10 now weighs in at under 200mb at startup, down from ~500mb in Linkerd 2.9, shedding non-critical components that previously shipped by default.

The initial set of new Linkerd extensions includes viz: Containing all the on-cluster metrics stack: Prometheus, Grafana, the dashboard, etc.; multicluster: Containing all the machinery for cross-cluster communication; and jaeger: Containing the distributed tracing collector and UI.

By offering Prometheus, Grafana, dashboard, and other components as opt-in extensions, Linkerd adopters can choose exactly which elements of Linkerd they want to install on their cluster.

This update also enables the Linkerd community to build Linkerd-specific operators and controllers without having to modify the core Linkerd CLI.

Linkerd 2.10 makes service mesh easier to use and flexible so that its benefits — namely security, observability, and reliability — can be applied to a wider number of use cases.

Linkerd 2.10 includes a number of other improvements, performance enhancements, and bug fixes that enhance its user experience, outlined in the full release notes.