Linkerd is simple to install, easy to use, and works out of the box as there are very few knobs that we have to tune. Istio is feature-rich, but some may encounter a bit of a learning curve to be able to use it effectively. Istio and Linkerd have their pros and cons, as we discussed in Chapter 4, Service Mesh Providers. Linkerd is heavily focussed on ease of use and performance. For example, Linkerd's 2.x proxy is developed in the Rust language to mitigate the performance problems of Linkerd 1.x, which was a very heavy-duty JVM-based implementation.
In this chapter, we explained Linkerd's architecture around control and data planes, installation, proxy configuration, ingress rules, observability, reliability, and security.
In the next chapter, we will delve into Linkerd's installation process and provide step-by-step instructions through live examples.
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