Releases and Versions

Releases of Linkerd are available in several different forms.

Stable releases

Stable release artifacts of Linkerd follow semantic versioning, whereby changes in major version denote large feature additions and possible breaking changes and changes in minor versions denote safe upgrades without breaking changes.

As of February 2024, Linkerd no longer provides stable release artifacts in the open source project itself. Instead, the vendor community around Linkerd is responsible for creating stable release artifacts. Known distributions of Linkerd with stable release artifacts include:

• Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd from Buoyant, creators of Linkerd. Latest version: enterprise-2.15.2 [release notes].

Edge releases

Edge release artifacts are published on a weekly or near-weekly basis as part of the open source project. The full list of edge release artifacts can be found on the Linkerd GitHub releases page.

Edge release artifacts contain the code in from the main branch at the point in time when they were cut. This means they always have the latest features and fixes, and have undergone automated testing as well as maintianer code review. Edge releases may involve partial features that are later modified or backed out. They may also involve breaking changes—of course, we do our best to avoid this.

Edge release versioning follows the form edge-y.m.n, where y is the last two digits of the year, m is the numeric month, and n is numeric edge release count for that month. For example:

• edge-23.9.1: the first edge release shipped in September 2023
• edge-24.1.3: the third edge release shipped in January 2024

Using edge release artifacts and reporting bugs helps us ensure a rapid pace of development and is a great way to help Linkerd. We publish edge release guidance as part of the release notes and strive to always provide production-ready artifacts.

Latest version: edge-24.5.1 [release notes].