Introduction to Service Mesh with Linkerd (edX)

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.

What you'll learn

• 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.

Syllabus

Welcome
Chapter 1. What Is a Service Mesh?
Chapter 2. Linkerd and the Service Mesh Ecosystem
Chapter 3. Linkerd Architecture
Chapter 4. The Data Plane Starring Linkerd2-proxy
Chapter 5. The Linkerd Control Plane
Chapter 6. Linkerd Extensions
Chapter 7. Deploying Linkerd to a Kubernetes Cluster
Chapter 8. Getting "Golden Metrics" for Your Applications
Chapter 9. Using Service Profiles for Per-Route Metrics
Chapter 10. Retries and Timeouts
Chapter 11. Securing your Application Communication with mTLS
Chapter 12. Canary and Blue-Green Deployments
Chapter 13. Using Linkerd in Production
Chapter 14. Course Summary and Next Steps
Final Exam