With the massive adoption of microservices, operators and developers face far more complexity in their applications today. Service meshes can help you manage this problem by providing a unified control plane to secure, manage, and monitor your entire network. This practical guide shows you how the Linkerd service mesh enables cloud-native developers—including platform and site reliability engineers—to solve the thorny issue of running distributed applications in Kubernetes. Jason Morgan and Flynn draw on their years of experience at Buoyant—the creators of Linkerd—to demonstrate how this service mesh can help ensure that your applications are secure, observable, and reliable. You'll understand why Linkerd, the original service mesh, can still claim the lowest time to value of any mesh option available today. When the Linkerd2 rewrite started, the Rust programming language had been gaining attention for its memory safety, which enables developers to write code that avoids many of the memory management vulnerabilities inherent to C and C++, while still compiling to native code for high performance. This book is meant to help anyone who thinks it’s easier to get things done when creating, running, or debugging microservices applications, and is looking to Linkerd to help with that. You’ll need some basic knowledge of Kubernetes, the overall concept of running things in containers, and the Unix command line to get the most out of this book. Some familiarity with Prometheus, Helm, Jaeger, etc. will also be helpful, but isn’t really critical.