Linkerd 2.18 advances cloud-native service mesh

The project’s focus has evolved significantly over the years. While early adoption centered on mutual TLS between pods, today’s enterprises are tackling much larger challenges.

“For a long time, the most common pattern was simply, ‘I want to get mutual TLS between all my pods, which gives me encryption, and it gives me authentication,’” Morgan said. “More recently, one of the biggest drivers has been multi-cluster communication… now our customers are deploying hundreds of clusters and they’re planning for thousands of clusters.”

What’s new in Linkerd 2.18

Morgan describes the theme of 2.18 as “battle-scarred spectacular,” reflecting refinements based on real-world production experience with customers. Key improvements include:

1. Enhanced multi-cluster support: Better integration with GitOps workflows. “When you have 200 or 2000 clusters, you’re driving that all declaratively. You’ve got a GitOps approach… the multi-cluster implementation had to be adapted to fit into that world,” Morgan explained.
2. Improved protocol configuration: Addressing edge cases for organizations pushing Kubernetes to its limits.
3. Gateway API decoupling: Improvements that reflect the maturation of the Gateway API standard and better shared resource management.
4. Preliminary Windows support: An experimental proxy build for Windows workloads, expanding beyond Linux environments.

What sets Linkerd apart and why AI isn’t a focus (yet)

While Linkerd was the first cloud-native service mesh, in 2025 it certainly isn’t the only one. Linkerd is often compared with Istio, which is another open-source CNCF service mesh project.

“The biggest difference from us has been a focus on what we’re calling operational simplicity, which is, how do we provide this very rich set of functionality to you in a way that doesn’t overwhelm you with the resulting complexity,” Morgan said.

Unlike competitors, Linkerd doesn’t use the open-source Envoy technology as its sidecar proxy. Instead, Linkerd has its own custom proxy that has been written in the Rust programming language. According to Morgan, that makes Linkerd very secure and very fast.