API Management in the CRD World: What Linkerd Has Learned
Lightningat KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 · on Tuesday, 2025-04-01· at 11:24· Platinum Suite | Level 3·
summary
Linkerd reports that its control plane and Rust-based data plane run with minimal footprint and zero-config mTLS, but the real focus is CRD pain points: versioning breaks, webhook-based validation becomes necessary, and shared CRDs like Gateway API cause lifecycle conflicts. Five concrete rules emerge: keep CRDs minimal, prefer human-facing fields, avoid excess configurability, use annotations for experiments but expect validation limits, and above all don't install shared CRDs for users.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (8)
- 0:00Linkerd and service mesh
- 1:26Shared CRDs challenges
- 2:50CRD design lessons
- 4:13Simple APIs
- 5:15Key takeaways
- 5:59LFX mentorship
- 7:03Selecting mentees
- 8:46Mentorship results
