The San Francisco Linkerd May Meetup was a fun night filled with Linkerd enthusiasts, education, great food, and lots of good conversation. If you missed it, we’ve got ya covered: all the talks were recorded!

Talk 1: Meshing from monolith to microservices with Linkerd

In this talk, Leo Liang, engineering manager at Cruise Automation, spoke about how OfferUp (his previous employer) evolved a high growth startup architecture into the microservice world through practical architecture examples. Over the past 2.5 years, Leo and his team worked with the Linkered community, leveraged with Consul, Nginx, Prometheus, and deeply customized Linkerd with Plugins to build up the service mesh. While at OfferUp his team scaled to billions of requests per day with ever improving system reliability and flexibility.

Talk 2: REST to gRPC with Linkerd

In this talk, Kevin Lingerfelt, a software engineer at Buoyant and a core contributor to the Linkerd project, shared how companies are moving their architectures from REST-based APIs to gRPC. His talk covered reasons for moving and best practices for running gRPC in production. He detailed on how Linkerd enhances gRPC by providing metrics, load balancing, and support for timeout and retries. He also described how the Linkerd project itself employs multiple gRPC features to facilitate robust communication between its control plane and its data plane.

The San Francisco Linkerd Meetup group is a gathering spot for like-minded developers and engineers of all skill levels who are interested in Linkerd, the open source service mesh. Join us now! Want to give a talk, or have a venue in SF that can host this meetup? Please email events@buoyant.io!