Linkerd Edge Release Roundup: April 2024

Welcome to the April 2024 Edge Release Roundup post, where we dive into the most recent edge releases to help keep everyone up to date on the latest and greatest! This month, we’re covering the releases from edge-24.4.5 back to edge-24.3.3 – there’s a lot here so we’ll get right into it.

How to give feedback

Remember, edge releases are a snapshot of our current development work on main; by definition, they always have the most recent features but they may have incomplete features, features that end up getting rolled back later, or (gasp!) even bugs. If you’re running edge releases, it’s very important that you send us feedback on how things are going for you!

We would be delighted to hear how these releases work out for you! You can open a GitHub issue or discussion, join us on Slack, or visit the Buoyant Linkerd Forum – all are great ways to reach us.

Community contributions

We couldn’t do what we do without the Linkerd community, and this batch of releases is definitely no exception. Huge thanks to Adarsh Jaiswal, Akshay Dongaonkar, Cemal Y. Dalar, Firas Medini, Grigoriy Mikhalkin, hanghuge, Heiko Voigt, Ilia Lazebnik, Hirotaka Tagawa, and occupyhabit for their contributions! You’ll find more information about all of these contributions in the release-by-release details below.

Breaking changes and recommendations

There are no breaking changes in these releases. However, we have two specific recommendations:

• We recommend edge-24.4.4 instead of edge-24.4.3 due to a metrics-naming regression in edge-24.4.3.
• We recommend edge-24.3.4 instead of edge-24.3.3 since edge-24.3.4 contains an important fix for Gateway API users.

The releases

Recent edge releases have been mostly focused on upcoming IPv6 support and some significant bugfixes. Of course, each edge release has many dependency updates; we won’t list them all here, but you can find them in the release notes for each release.

(Last Roundup we did these in chronological order, but we’re switching this time to reverse chronological order, starting with the most recent.)

edge-24.4.5 (April 25, 2024)

This edge release fixes support for native sidecars in the Linkerd CNI plugin, continues work on upcoming IPv6 support, and allows setting revisionHistoryLimit when installing with Helm to specify how many ReplicaSets to keep around for rollback purposes (thanks, Ilia Lazebnik!)

It also allows setting certain HTTP/2 server parameters using environment variables in the proxy container (see proxy PR 2924 if you think you need this!).

edge-24.4.4 (April 18, 2024)

This edge release fixes a metrics naming regression introduced in the previous release, restoring the outbound_http_... metrics to their correct names instead of duplicating http.

edge-24.4.3 (April 18, 2024)

We recommend edge-24.4.4 instead of this release due to a metrics-naming regression in edge-24.4.3.

This edge release fixes the second of two issues where where policy.linkerd.io HTTPRoutes could be endlessly patched even when they weren’t changing (issue 12310).

edge-24.4.2 (April 11, 2024)

This edge release fixes an issue where the service mirror controller would panic if it encountered an error listing mirror services while fixing its list of endpoints, and continues work on upcoming IPv6 support. It also allows correctly setting policy controller resources via Helm, instead of just defaulting them to the same as the destination controller (thanks, Grigoriy Mikhalkin!), allows relabeling metrics to customize how high-cardinality metrics get handled (thanks, Heiko Voigt!), and does a little cleanup of documentation in the code (thanks, hanghuge!). Finally, it adds a new linkerd diagnostics profile command which gives low-level visibility into which ServiceProfile is attached to a given address.

edge-24.4.1 (April 4, 2024)

This edge release continues work on upcoming IPv6 support.

edge-24.3.5 (March 28, 2024)

This edge release adds metrics to the queue of HTTPRoute status updates and makes the ExternalWorkload resource’s status as a subresource, as it always should have been. It also corrects the scope of the proxy-injector, tap-injector, and jaeger-injector mutating webhook rules to Namespaced (thanks Firas Medini!), and cleans up some documentation in the code (thanks occupyhabit!).

edge-24.3.4 (March 22, 2024)

This edge release fixes the first of two issues where policy.linkerd.io HTTPRoutes could be endlessly patched even when they weren’t changing (issue 12104), and another where the destination controller could generate large numbers of unnecessary endpoint updates when a Server changed. It also adds default values to generated docs for the proxy-*-connect-timeout annotations (thanks Akshay Dongaonkar!), fixes excessive logging in the injector webhook (issue 12186, thanks Adarsh Jaiswal!), and cleans up an unneeded error message from the destination controller (thanks Hirotaka Tagawa!).

Finally, this edge release fixes an issue that could mistakenly turn off local traffic policy when an endpoint is removed (issue 12311), adds a timeout to HTTPRoute status patches, continues work on upcoming IPv6 support, and stops unnecessarily checking about injecting the kube-system namespace when running in HA mode.

edge-24.3.3 (March 14, 2024)

We recommend edge-24.3.4 instead of this release since edge-24.3.4 contains an important fix.

This edge release allows configuring the pod disruption budget via Helm (issue 11321, thanks Cemal Y. Dalar!).

Installing the latest edge release

Installing the latest edge release needs just a single command.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSfL https://run.linkerd.io/install-edge | sh

You can also install edge releases with Helm.

Linkerd is for everyone

Linkerd is a graduated project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Linkerd is committed to open governance. If you have feature requests, questions, or comments, we’d love to have you join our rapidly-growing community! Linkerd is hosted on GitHub, and we have a thriving community on Slack, Twitter, and in mailing lists. Come and join the fun!

Linkerd generally does new edge releases weekly; watch this space to keep up-to-date. Feedback on this blog series is welcome! Just ping @flynn on the Linkerd Slack.