buoyant.io

Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd

The enterprise distribution of Linkerd brought to you by Buoyant, the creators of Linkerd.

enterprise-2.17.1

February 4, 2025

The 2.17.1 stable point release includes bugfixes and minor improvements.

Previous release: enterprise-2.17.0.

Supported Kubernetes versions

For this release, the minimum supported Kubernetes version remains 1.22, and the maximum supported Kubernetes version remains 1.31.

Who should upgrade?

Customers who are affected by one of the bugs outlined in the changelog below should upgrade as soon as possible. All other customers should upgrade at their convenience.

Upgrade guidance

This is a stable point release designed to introduce minimal change. Please see the instructions in Upgrading BEL for how to upgrade.

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.33.3 or later.

Changelog

  • Fixed a bug in the control plane’s policy controller component where routes whose parentRef does not specify a port could become stale and cause incorrect routing. (linkerd2#13584)
  • Improved handling of large numbers of mirrored services managed by the service mirror controller, by improving the logic behind the Link status handling. (linkerd2#13579)
  • Relaxed pod readiness requirements in the Destination controller to avoid blocking workloads requiring connectivity before becoming ready (e.g. Cassandra, Kafka). (linkerd2#13557)
  • Bumped linkerd-cni to v1.6.0, which adds a new iptables mode “plain” in support of RHEL, and properly detects when the linkerd-cni DaemonSet service account token is rotated (fixes issue observed in AKS clusters using OIDC keys). (linkerd2#13474, linkerd2#13457, and linkerd2#13407)
  • Bumped linkerd-extension-init to v0.1.2, which fixes an error when installing linkerd extensions with Helm in IPv6-only clusters. (linkerd2#13486)
  • Fixed handling of the proxy-log-level config to fully support log filters. (linkerd2#13480)
  • Improved detection of Linkerd proxies with FIPS modules with the linkerd fips audit command.
  • Updated Go to 1.23.5 to remediate CVE-2024-45336 and CVE-2024-45341

enterprise-2.16.4

February 4, 2025

The 2.16.4 stable point release includes bugfixes and minor improvements.

Previous release: enterprise-2.16.3.

Supported Kubernetes versions

For this release, the minimum supported Kubernetes version remains 1.22, and the maximum supported Kubernetes version remains 1.31.

Who should upgrade?

Customers who are affected by one of the bugs outlined in the changelog below should upgrade as soon as possible. All other customers should upgrade at their convenience.

Upgrade guidance

This is a stable point release designed to introduce minimal change. Please see the instructions in Upgrading BEL for how to upgrade.

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.33.3 or later.

Changelog

  • Fixed a bug in the control plane’s policy controller component where routes whose parentRef does not specify a port could become stale and cause incorrect routing. (linkerd2#13584)
  • Relaxed pod readiness requirements in the Destination controller to avoid blocking workloads requiring connectivity before becoming ready (e.g. Cassandra, Kafka). (linkerd2#13557)
  • Fixed handling of the proxy-log-level config to fully support log filters. (linkerd2#13480)
  • Updated Go to 1.23.5 to remediate CVE-2024-45336 and CVE-2024-45341

preview-25.1.1

January 30, 2025
  • Release candidate for the enterprise-2.16.4 release

enterprise-2.16.3

December 11, 2024

The 2.16.3 stable point release includes bugfixes and minor improvements.

Previous release: enterprise-2.16.2.

Supported Kubernetes versions

For this release, the minimum supported Kubernetes version remains 1.22, and the maximum supported Kubernetes version remains 1.31.

Who should upgrade?

Customers who are affected by one of the bugs outlined in the changelog below should upgrade as soon as possible. All other customers should upgrade at their convenience.

Upgrade guidance

This is a stable point release designed to introduce minimal change. Please see the instructions in Upgrading BEL for how to upgrade.

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.33.2 or later.

Changelog

Control plane changes

Proxy changes

enterprise-2.15.7

December 11, 2024

The 2.15.7 stable point release includes bugfixes and minor improvements.

Previous release: enterprise-2.15.6.

Supported Kubernetes versions

For this release, the minimum supported Kubernetes version remains 1.22, and the maximum supported Kubernetes version remains 1.31.

Who should upgrade?

Customers who are affected by one of the bugs outlined in the changelog below should upgrade as soon as possible. All other customers should upgrade at their convenience.

Upgrade guidance

This is a stable point release designed to introduce minimal change. Please see the instructions in Upgrading BEL for how to upgrade.

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.33.2 or later.

Changelog

Control plane changes

Proxy changes

enterprise-2.17.0

December 5, 2024

Linkerd 2.17 is a new major release that adds rate limiting, federated services, and monitoring and control of egress traffic from the cluster. See our Linkerd 2.17 announcement blog post for more details.

Who should upgrade?

This is a feature release. We recommend upgrading to BEL 2.17.0 for customers who want to make use of the new features introduced.

Supported Kubernetes versions

For this release, the minimum supported Kubernetes version is 1.22, and the maximum supported Kubernetes version is 1.31.

Upgrade guidance

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.33.2 or later.

There are several important notes before upgrading.

Breaking changes to Helm upgrades

If you use Helm to manage BEL, we’ve changed the way that the BEL Helm charts work to better align with Linkerd OSS charts. As of Linkerd 2.17, BEL Helm charts no longer depend on the open source Linkerd charts as subcharts, but instead incorporate the keys and values directly.

Note: IF you manage BEL upgrades via the CLI or the lifecycle automation operator, you are not affected by this change.

If you use Helm to manage BEL, any Helm values previously set on the Linkerd open source subchart keys must be moved up one level. For example, a Helm value prior to BEL 2.17.0 that was set like this:

license: xxx
linkerd-control-plane:
  foo: bar

Must now become:

license: xxx
foo: bar

With this change, the BEL charts now align with the OSS charts, simplifying transition between the two.

For more details on how to upgrade BEL using Helm, including how to automate this change, please see our Upgrading BEL documentation.

Changelog

New features

  • Introduce an EgressNetwork CRD, used to configure traffic that is destined outside the cluster and enable metrics (linkerd2#13181). See egress docs.
  • Introduce http local rate limiting support (linkerd2#13231). See rate limiting docs.
  • Add support for federated services, which assemble multiple services with the same name and namespace across multiple different clusters into a single logical service. See federated services docs.

Other changes and bug fixes

Control plane

  • Add a flag to enable the service mirror controller to create namespaces which do not already exist when necessary to create a mirror service (linkerd2#13137)
  • Avoid panic on missing managed fields timestamp (linkerd2#13378)
  • Check Service port in admission controller (linkerd2#13325)
  • Ensure status controller honors leader expiry (linkerd2#13392)
  • Fix a bug where route changes could be ignored when the route’s parent_refs change (linkerd2#13315)
  • Fix policy readiness probe delay (linkerd2#13380)
  • Polish policy controller logging (linkerd2#13379)
  • Run status reconciliation at fixed interval (linkerd2#13384)
  • Set parent and profile references (linkerd2#13292)
  • Set the control plane to run with automountServiceAccountToken: false (linkerd2#13186)

Proxy

  • Add a wall clock gauge to the proxy’s prometheus metrics, which allows for more accurate calculation of certificate timeouts, etc (linkerd2-proxy#3176)
  • Add new request_frame_size and response_frame_size Prometheus metrics, instrumenting request and response bodies. These observe (a) the number of frames yielded by a body, (b) the total number of frames, and (c) a coarse distribution of frame sizes. These histograms are labeled by route and backend, for requests and responses, respectively.
  • Add support for outbound policy configuration based on TLSRoutes and SNI detection (linkerd2-proxy#3160)
  • Add support for outbound policy configuration for opaque connections (linkerd2-proxy#3306)
  • Add support for the OpenTelemetry protocol for traces exported from the proxy. When installing the Jaeger extension, set the webhook.collectorTraceProtocol to opentelemetry to enable this. Example: linkerd jaeger install --set webhook.collectorTraceProtocol=opentelemetry | kubectl apply -f (linkerd2#13099, linkerd2-proxy#3221)
  • Add transport level metrics for both TLS and Opaque connections (linkerd2-proxy#3355)
  • Allow configuration of the service name used by the proxy when exporting traces. Defaults to linkerd-proxy. (linkerd2#13130, linkerd2-proxy#3245)
  • Export the zone locality of cluster traffic as a dedicated outbound_tcp_zone_locality prometheus metric (linkerd2#13129, linkerd2-proxy#3262)
  • Fix a panic in the proxy when the destination controller provides multiple identical endpoints linkerd2-proxy#3319
  • Handle timeouts with a DeadlineExceeded error (linkerd2-proxy#3302)
  • Improve linkerd-cni behavior when a node’s inotify limit is reached, by not failing silently (linkerd2-proxy-init#424)
  • Log the absolute timestamp when using the JSON log format (linkerd2-proxy#3186)

External workload automation

  • Add support for dual-stack networking to the ExternalWorkloads CRD (linkerd2#12965)

Multi-cluster extension

  • Improve configurability of the health probes for the multicluster gateway. After applying a Link CR, just tweak the new failureThreshold and timeout fields (Backported to enterprise-2.16.1)

Jaeger extension

  • Fix the Jaeger extension’s injector incorrectly propagating annotations in some cases linkerd2#13165

Viz extension

  • Add viz stat-inbound and viz stat-outbound commands which are easier to use replacements for the viz stat command (linkerd2#12994)
  • Add the ability to Linkerd-viz to connect to a Prometheus which is configured with basic auth by allowing the user to provide a secret from which Linkerd-viz will read the basic auth credentials (linkerd2#13035)

CVE remediations and updates

  • Update libssl3 in extension-init and policy-controller for FIPS, and in proxy for both non-FIPS and FIPS to remediate CVE-2024-5535, and CVE-2024-9143 (Backported to enterprise-2.16.2-1)
  • Update libcrypto3 and libssl3 in proxy-init for both non-FIPS and FIPS to remediate CVE-2024-9143 (Backported to enterprise-2.16.2-1)
  • Bump kubert from 0.21.2 to 0.22.0 (linkerd2#13399)
  • Update latest k8s version to 1.31 (linkerd2#13374)

enterprise-2.16.2

November 4, 2024

The 2.16.2 stable point release includes bugfixes and minor improvements.

Previous release: enterprise-2.16.1.

Supported Kubernetes versions

For this release, the minimum supported Kubernetes version remains 1.22, and the maximum supported Kubernetes version remains 1.31.

Who should upgrade?

2.16.1 users who use the high-availability zonal load balancer (HAZL) should upgrade to this version. 2.16.0 users who use gRPC with retries should also upgrade.

Upgrade guidance

This is a stable point release designed to introduce minimal change. Please see the instructions in Upgrading BEL for how to upgrade.

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.33.0 or later.

Changelog

CLI changes

  • Fix linkerd license command not outputting the server’s license in some cases.

Proxy changes

enterprise-2.16.1

October 14, 2024

The 2.16.1 stable point release includes bugfixes and minor improvements.

Previous release: enterprise-2.16.0.

Supported Kubernetes versions

For this release, the minimum supported Kubernetes version remains 1.22, and the maximum supported Kubernetes version has been increased to 1.31.

Who should upgrade?

2.16.0 users who use gRPC with retries should upgrade to this version. All other users may upgrade at their convenience or skip this release.

Upgrade guidance

This is a stable point release designed to introduce minimal change. Please see the instructions in Upgrading BEL for how to upgrade.

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.32.1 or later.

Changelog

CLI changes

  • Fix linkerd policy generate command to work on with BEL proxies that have custom image names.

Helm changes

  • Improved configurability of the health probes for the multicluster gateway. After applying a Link CR, just tweak the new failureThreshold and timeout fields.
  • Fix ability to set tolerations for the linkerd-autoregistration and linkerd-enterprise workloads
  • Docker images and Helm packages are now signed. Learn more.

Proxy changes

  • Fix a bug in which the linkerd2-proxy may panic if a response was received before a request frame with the END_STREAM flag was sent (linkerd2-proxy#3216)

CVE remediations and updates

enterprise-2.15.6

October 14, 2024

The 2.15.6 stable point release includes bugfixes and minor improvements.

Previous release: enterprise-2.15.5.

Supported Kubernetes versions

For this release, the minimum supported Kubernetes version remains 1.22, and the maximum supported Kubernetes version has been increased to 1.31.

Who should upgrade?

2.15.x users who use gRPC with retries should upgrade to this version, or to 2.16.1. All other users may upgrade at their convenience or skip this release.

Upgrade guidance

This is a stable point release designed to introduce minimal change. Please see the instructions in Upgrading BEL for how to upgrade.

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.32.1 or later.

Changelog

CLI changes

  • Fix linkerd policy generate command to work on with BEL proxies that have custom image names.

Helm changes

  • Improved configurability of the health probes for the multicluster gateway. After applying a Link CR, just tweak the new failureThreshold and timeout fields.

Proxy changes

  • Fix a bug in which the linkerd2-proxy may panic if a response was received before a request frame with the END_STREAM flag was sent (linkerd2-proxy#3216)

CVE remediations and updates

enterprise-2.14.10-14

October 14, 2024

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.32.1 or later.

enterprise-2.16.0

August 13, 2024

Linkerd 2.16 is a new major release that adds new retry, timeout, and per-route metrics to HTTPRoute and GRPCRoute types, bringing Linkerd’s Gateway API implementation to feature parity with ServiceProfiles and addressing some long-standing wrinkles with these features. Linkerd 2.16 also adds support for IPv6 and introduces an audit mode for Linkerd’s zero trust network policies.

Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd 2.16.0 also introduces new external workload automation to ease the management of VMs and other off-cluster workloads, and a “send a flare” remote diagnostics CLI command.

See the Linkerd 2.16 announcement blog post for more details.

Who should upgrade?

This is a feature release. We recommend upgrading to BEL 2.16.0 for customers who:

  • Need to manage meshed VM or off-cluster applications at scale;
  • Need to run Linkerd on IPv6 networks;
  • Are introducing authorization policy to live environments and want to derisk adoption; or
  • Are making significant use of retries, timeouts, and circuit breaking, and want to have a consistent model for composing these features.

Note that while BEL 2.16.0 includes several significant bugfixes, these have all been backported to earlier BEL 2.15.x point releases.

Supported Kubernetes versions

For this release, the minimum supported Kubernetes version is 1.22, and the maximum supported Kubernetes version is 1.29.

Upgrade guidance

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.32.0 or later.

There are several important notes before upgrading.

Gateway API resource management

Linkerd 2.16 requires the Gateway API CRDs to be installed on the cluster. These CRDs can either be installed and managed by Linkerd, or they can be installed and managed by another component on the system. (For example, GCP clusters may already have these CRDs installed by default.)

If you want these CRDs to be managed by Linkerd (the default): proceed as normal. Linkerd will install these CRDs for you and upgrade them as appropriate.

If the CRDs are managed by another component: Set the enableHttpRoutes setting to “false” when upgrading or installing Linkerd. In this mode, Linkerd will not touch these CRDs. Note that if the CRDs correspond to an earlier version of the Gateway API that does not include the GRPCRoute CRD, Linkerd’s GRPCRoute-related functionality will not be available, but Linkerd will otherwise operate normally.

Breaking changes to shutdown endpoint

To mitigate CVE-2024-40632, in which a meshed application that is already vulnerable to an SSRF attack may also leave the proxy open to shutdown, the /shutdown endpoint is now disabled by default. This endpoint is used to terminate the proxy programmatically, typically by the linkerd-await command as part of a meshed Job or CronJob workload.

While native sidecar support has reduced the need for this endpoint, it can be re-enabled by setting proxy.enableShutdownEndpoint to “true”.

Docker runtime version incompatibilities

Due to an incompatibility between modern versions of glibc and old versions of the Docker runtime engine, Linkerd 2.16 no longer supports Docker runtime earlier than version 20.10.10. Attempting to run Linkerd with an old Docker runtime will result in a proxy crash.

To determine whether you have an older Docker runtime, run the command

kubectl get node -o jsonpath="{.items[*].status.nodeInfo.containerRuntimeVersion}"

If the output is of the form docker://20.x.y, ensure the version is greater than 20.10.10. If the output is of the form containerd://..., this issue should not affect you.

Changes to log output

Prior to Linkerd 2.16, HTTP headers were logged by the proxy when the log level was set to debug or trace. These headers may contain sensitive information such as access tokens. As of Linkerd 2.16, these headers are no longer part of log output in debug or trace modes. Header output can be reenabled by setting the logHTTPHeaders configuration value to “insecure”.

Changelog

New features

  • Timeouts and retries can now be configured with Gateway API HTTPRoute and GRPCRoute resources. Timeout and retry configuration can be placed as annotations on HTTPRoutes, GRPCRoutes, or their parent Services to control client behavior matching these resources.
  • Retries and timeouts configured with Gateway API resources have improved semantics compared to those configured with ServiceProfiles: they can be combined with circuit breaking, and requests that timeout are eligible for retries. Learn more.
  • Linkerd now emits traffic metrics for HTTPRoute and GRPCRoute resources, providing granular per-route telemetry about traffic matching those resources.
  • A new “audit mode” has been introduced that allows safer introduction of authorization policy to live systems. When enabled, corresponding policy violations will be logged but not enforced. Audit mode can be enabled on specific policy resources and the policy generation command now uses audit mode as the default. Learn more.
  • Linkerd now features an IPv6 mode that supports both IPv6-only and dual-stack clusters (using only IPv6 endpoints in the latter case). This mode is disabled by default; to enable set disableIPv6:false. Learn more.
  • BEL now provides significant automation to ease the management of external workloads (e.g. applications running on VMs): This includes a “harness” that runs alongside the application and handles the mechanics of network configuration, registration, and probes; an ExternalGroup CRD that provides a principled way to manage multiple similar external applications (e.g. multiple replicas); and an autoregistration control plane component that ties the two together.

Other notable changes

  • HTTP/2 keep-alive messages are now enabled by default for all meshed communication, allowing proxies to proactively detect connections that have been lost by the underlying network or OS. (linkerd2#12498 and linkerd2#12504)
  • Linkerd CLI commands that output Kubernetes resources now support JSON output.
  • The proxy’s /shutdown endpoint is now disabled by default, unless explicitly enabled. (linkerd2#12705)
  • HTTP headers are no longer logged in debug or trace output, unless explicitly enabled (linkerd2#12665)
  • Resource requests for proxy-init now simple use those of the proxy, removing unnecessary configuration. (linkerd2#12741)
  • A new control plane component, linkerd-enterprise, now handles BEL-specific functionality, and, if enabled, a new linkerd-autoregistration component handles automation of external workloads.

Bug fixes

  • Fix a bug in the destination controller causing incorrect local traffic policy (linkerd2#12254)
  • Fix a bug in the destination controller where it could drop updates when there were a large number of Server resources (linkerd2#12013)
  • Fix panic in service mirror controller (linkerd2#12406)
  • Fix bug where policy controller would continuously update HTTPRoute status (linkerd2#12454)
  • Fix a bug where backend_not_found route status was being set incorrectly (linkerd2#12565)
  • Remove an internal limit on the number of concurrent gRPC streams to the control plane, leaving available memory as the only constraint (linkerd2#12598)
  • Fix bug where the policy controller could get stuck with stale data when services change (linkerd2#12635)
  • Fix bug where the policy controller could return incorrect initial data for HttpRoutes in a producer namespace (linkerd2#12619)

Other changes

Control plane

CLI

  • Modify linkerd policy generate use audit-mode Server resources by default. Previous behavior can be enabled by using the --disable-audit flag.
  • Introduce a new linkerd policy generate --concurrency flag to decrease time for policy generation
  • Fix typo in diagnostics command (linkerd2#12723)

Helm manifests

  • Simplify license configuration. Setting additionalEnv values for custom licenses is no longer necessary.
  • Relax Helm chart release name constraints. Helm release names are no longer required to be named linkerd-crds and linkerd-control-plane.
  • Default Policy controller resources to destination resources in manifest (linkerd2#12191)

CVE remediations and updates

  • Update Go Docker dependency in controller for both non-FIPS and FIPS to remediate: CVE-2024-41110

enterprise-2.15.5

July 11, 2024

The 2.15.5 stable point release includes a variety of bug fixes and proxy configuration features, including a fix for CVE-2024-40632.

Previous release: enterprise-2.15.4.

Who should upgrade?

  • Users who are experiencing panics in the destination controller, or who want to run the CLI without setting the BUOYANT_LICENSE envvar, should upgrade.
  • Users who want to further secure their Linkerd installation by disabling the /shutdown endpoint or by removing HTTP header content from debug logging, should upgrade.

All other users may upgrade at their convenience or skip this release.

How to upgrade

Please see the instructions in Upgrading BEL.

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.30.0 or later.

Full Changelog

CLI changes

  • Remove requirement that CLI users must always set the BUOYANT_LICENSE environment variable. Note that a license must still be provided to commands that require it (e.g. install), either via the environment variable or the --set license=... flag.
  • Improve error handling and timeout behavior in the linkerd license command

Control plane changes

  • Fix panic in the destination controller when reading endpoint hostname (backported from linkerd2#12689)

Proxy changes

  • Add config to disable proxy /shutdown admin endpoint (backported from linkerd2#12705). When enabled, this remediates CVE-2024-40632.
  • Add config to disable outputting HTTP headers by default in proxy debug logs (backported from linkerd2#12665)

Mesh expansion changes

  • Remove empty shortnames from ExternalWorkload (backported from linkerd2#12793)

CVE remediations and updates

enterprise-2.15.4

June 12, 2024

The 2.15.4 stable point release includes a variety of bug fixes and some minor diagnostic and configuration features.

Previous release: enterprise-2.15.3.

Who should upgrade?

  • Users who are seeing OOMKills in the linkerd-destination service at scale should upgrade. This release improves memory of the destination controller at scale.
  • Users who are using HTTPRoutes should upgrade. This release fixes several issues, including issues that may cause routing to fail sporadically.
  • Users who have to unset an existing ENVIRONMENT environment variable to use the Linkerd CLI may upgrade to avoid this issue.

All other users may upgrade at their convenience or skip this release.

How to upgrade

Please see the instructions in Upgrading BEL.

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.29.0 or later.

Full Changelog

CLI changes

  • Fix an issue where linkerd install-cni was outputting an invalid image URL
  • Fix an issue where the CLI was reading configuration information from an ENVIRONMENT envvar, which was sometimes already set in customer environments. The CLI no longer uses this variable.
  • Add a new --token flag to the linkerd diagnostics policy command, to allow users to see the policy from the perspective of a a specific Kubernetes context (backported from linkerd2#12613)

Control plane changes

  • Remove unnecessary stream concurrency limits (backported from linkerd2#12598)
  • Allow control plane components to specify concurrency (backported from linkerd2#12643)
  • Fix issue where initial outbound policy did not contain producer routes (backported from linkerd2#12619)
  • Set backend_not_found route status when any backends are not found (backported from linkerd2#12565)
  • Reindex outbound policy backends when a service changes (backported from linkerd2#12635)

CVE remediations and updates

  • Update busybox in proxy-init Docker image to remediate CVE-2023-42364
  • Update busybox in proxy-init Docker image to remediate CVE-2023-42365
  • Update the default Docker image user to be non-root, which was occasionally being flagged by overly pedantic vulnerability scanners
  • Update Go from 1.22.3 to 1.22.4

preview-24.5.6

May 31, 2024
  • Test build of the of the autoregistration harness

enterprise-2.15.3

May 20, 2024

The 2.15.3 stable point release includes a variety of bug fixes, usability improvements, and new diagnostic and configuration features. It also adjusts the default configuration of the HAZL load balancer to be more aggressive in shifting load to other zones.

Previous release: enterprise-2.15.2.

Who should upgrade?

  • Users who are using native sidecars should upgrade. This release contains several bugfixes related to native sidecars.
  • Users who are making heavy use of HTTPRoutes, or who are experiencing high memory usage in the policy controller accompanied by “Failed to patch HTTPRoute” error messages, should upgrade. This release fixes an issue with how the policy controller was interacting with the Kubnetes API for HTTPRoutes.
  • Users who are using multicluster should upgrade. This release fixes a panic in the service mirror controller as well as another minor issue.

How to upgrade

Please see the instructions in Upgrading BEL.

Note that in this release, we’ve moved the on-cluster storage for license keys from ConfigMaps to Secrets. Users with license keys in ConfigMaps will be automatically upgraded to a Secret. For more information on managing licenses, see Configuring license secret installation.

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.29.0 or later.

Full Changelog

CLI changes

  • Print license information to stderr instead of stdout
  • Install version edge-24.2.4 of viz and jaeger extensions, rather than pointing to non-existing BEL versions
  • Remove the need to include the --set license= flag on install commands
  • Add a diagnostics profile command (backported from linkerd2#12383)

Helm chart changes

  • Correct the minimum supported Kubernetes version in the BEL Helm charts to 1.22 (not 1.21)
  • Support arbitrary proxy parameters in Helm values (backported from linkerd2#12493)

Control plane changes

  • Move license storage from a ConfigMap to a Secret
  • Revert HAZL default load band parameters to the configuration used in BEL 2.15.1 and earlier, allowing HAZL to be more aggressive in shifting to other zones by default
  • Update HTTPRoutes CRD to include a port field in the route status parent ref (backported from linkerd2#12454)
  • Fix multiple issues with native sidecars (backported from linkerd2#12453)
  • Update policy controller to rename “patchs” metric to “patches” (backported from linkerd2#12533)

Extension changes

  • Fix panic in mulitcluster service mirror controller (backported from linkerd2#12406)
  • Avoid unnecessary headless endpoint mirrors cleanups during GC (backported from linkerd2#12500)

Proxy changes

CVE remediations and updates

preview-24.5.3

May 15, 2024
  • First release of the autoregistration harness

enterprise-2.15.2

April 5, 2024

The 2.15.2 stable point release includes bug fixes, CVE remediations, and some minor feature updates. It merges HAZL into the main proxy build (previous releases required a separate build), improves certain metrics, and fixes a memory leak in the policy controller.

Who should upgrade?

  • Users who want to use the high-availability zonal load balancer (HAZL) should upgrade to this release, as it no longer requires a separate proxy image.
  • Users who are experiencing a memory leak in the policy controller component of the control plane should upgrade.
  • Other users should upgrade at their convenience.

How to upgrade

Please follow the instructions in Upgrading Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd.

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.27.4 or later.

Full Changelog

CLI changes

  • Introduce a linkerd license CLI command, to output client and server license information.
  • Update linkerd check to validate Linkerd version strings that include build and patch info, e.g. enterprise-2.15.1-1-fips

Helm changes

  • Introduce a licenseSecret Helm value to allow storing the Buoyant license in a Kubernetes secret.

Control plane changes

  • Backport fix(injector): Stop emitting warnings about skipped resources (linkerd2#12254)
  • Backport fix(destination): Removes should not change local traffic policy (linkerd2#12325)
  • Backport fix(identity): Log token validation errors at WARN (linkerd2#12187)
  • Backport fix(cli): Remove kube-system injection check (linkerd2#12263)
  • Backport fix(policy): Don’t patch httproute status if it hasn’t changed (linkerd2#12215)

Proxy changes

CVE remediations and updates

enterprise-2.15.1

February 23, 2024

This is a minor update that is primarily intended to assist Enterprise Plan users who are enabling HAZL.

Who should upgrade?

Users on the Enterprise Plan who want to enable HAZL should upgrade.

How to upgrade

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.27.2 or later.

Changelog

  • Updated Helm charts to synchronize with the newer AdditionalEnv and AdditionalArgs values, allowing users to enable features such as HAZL (when available) with the newer terminology.
  • Updated Go helm dependency to remediate CVE-2024-26147

enterprise-2.15.0

February 21, 2024

Linkerd 2.15 is a new major release that adds support for workloads outside of Kubernetes. This new “mesh expansion” feature allows Linkerd users to bring applications running on VMs, physical machines, and other non-Kubernetes locations into the mesh.

Linkerd 2.15 also introduces support for SPIFFE, a standard for workload identity which allows Linkerd to provide cryptographic identity and authentication to off-cluster workloads.

Finally, Linkerd 2.15 adds support for native sidecar containers, a new Kubernetes feature that eases some of the long-standing annoyances of the sidecar model in Kubernetes, especially with Job workloads.

See the BEL 2.15 announcement blog post for more details.

Who should upgrade?

This is a feature release that unlocks new capabilities. Users with non-Kubernetes workloads that they want to add to the mesh, or users who want to use Kubernetes 1.29, should upgrade.

Users with Job workloads, init container race conditions, or other situations that would benefit from native sidecar support, can upgrade to simplify their usage of Linkerd. Native sidecar support can obviate the need for linkerd-await in Job workloads and can allow Linkerd to work well with other init containers.

How to upgrade

To upgrade with BEL’s lifecycle automation operator, you will need Buoyant Extension version v0.27.1 or later.

Kubernetes version support

This release changes the minimum supported Kubernetes version to 1.22, and the update the maximum supported Kubernetes version to 1.29.

Changelog

Native sidecar containers

  • Introduced support for the native sidecar containers entering beta support in Kubernetes 1.29, improving the startup and shutdown ordering for the proxy relative to other containers, and fixing the long-standing shutdown issue with injected Jobs. Furthermore, traffic from other initContainers can now be proxied by Linkerd (#11465; fixes #11461).

Mesh expansion

  • Introduced a new ExternalWorkload CRD to support enrolling VMs into a meshed Kubernetes cluster
  • Introduced a new controller in the destination service that will manage EndpointSlice resources for Service objects that select external workloads

Control Plane

  • Fixed policy controller error when deleting a Gateway API HTTPRoute resource (#11471)
  • Fixed an issue where the Destination controller could stop processing service profile updates, if a proxy subscribed to those updates stops reading them (#11546)
  • Fixed an issue in the destination controller where the metadata API would not initialize a Job informer. The destination controller uses the metadata API to retrieve Job metadata, and relies mostly on informers. Without an initialized informer, an error message would be logged, and the controller relied on direct API calls (#11541; fixes #11531)
  • Fixed an issue in the destination controller that could cause outbound connections to hang indefinitely. (#11540 and #11556)
  • In the Destination controller, added informer lag histogram metrics to track whenever the Kubernetes objects watched by the controller are falling behind the state in the kube-apiserver (#11534)
  • Changed how the policy controller updates HTTPRoute status so that it doesn’t affect statuses from other non-linkerd controllers (#11705; fixes #11659)
  • Added a control plane metric to count errors talking to the Kubernetes API (#11774)
  • Fixed an issue causing spurious destination controller error messages for profile lookups on unmeshed pods with port in default opaque list (#11550)
  • Changed how Server updates are handled in the destination service. The change will ensure that during a cluster resync, consumers won’t be overloaded by redundant updates (#11907)
  • Updated the Destination controller to return INVALID_ARGUMENT status codes properly when a ServiceProfile is requested for a service that does not exist. (#11980)
  • Changed how updates to a Server selector are handled in the destination service. When a Server that marks a port as opaque no longer selects a resource, the resource’s opaqueness will reverted to default settings (#12031; fixes #11995)
  • Removed uses of OpenSSL v1.1.1 in favor of OpenSSL v3
  • Fixed a bug in the GetProfile API where the destination controller could become stuck and stop serving discovery responses.
  • Improved proxy logging so that all service discovery updates are logged at INFO.
  • Added externalWorkloadSelector to the Server resource to fascilitate policy for ExternalWorkloads` #11899
  • Added queue metrics to endpoints controller workqueue #11958
  • Implemented handling of EndpointSlices that point ExternalWorkload resources #11939
  • Enabled support for SPIFFE IDs in MeshTLSAuthentication #11882
  • Fixed a race condition in the destination service that could cause panics under very specific conditions #12022; fixes #12010

Proxy

  • Improved the load balancer so that service discovery updates are processed eagerly, ensuring that low-traffic services do not retain connections to defunct endpoints.
  • The proxy’s control plane clients now limit time they maintain discovery streams to ensure that load is more evenly distributed across control plane instances.
  • The proxy’s control plane clients now limit idle discovery streams to help prevent staleness.
  • Added a variety of load-balancer specific metrics to measure the queue’s state
  • Updated the hyper and h2 dependencies to address bugs
  • Fixed an issue where the default queue sizes were too small and could cause issues in high-traffic services
  • Fixed an issue where the ‘classification’ label was incorrectly applied on inbound gRPC traffic

Multi-cluster extension

  • Fixed a "duplicate metrics" warning in the multicluster service-mirror component #11875; fixes #11839
  • Fixed broken affinity rules for the multicluster service-mirror when running in HA mode
  • Added a new check to linkerd check that ensures all extension namespaces are configured properly
  • Fixed a bug where the linkerd multicluster link command’s --gateway-addresses flag was not respected when a remote gateway exists
  • Fixed an issue where an empty remoteDiscoverySelector field in a multicluster link would cause all services to be mirrored

Jaeger extension

  • Extended linkerd-jaeger’s imagePullSecrets Helm value to also apply to the namespace-metadata ServiceAccount #11504

Viz extension

  • Improved linkerd viz check to attempt to validate that the Prometheus scrape interval will work well with the CLI and Web query parameters (#11376)

Service Profiles

  • Fixed an issue in the ServiceProfile CRD schema. The schema incorrectly required that a not response match should be an array, which the service profile validator rejected since it expected an object. The schema has been updated to properly indicate that not values should be an object (#11510; fixes #11483)
  • Fixed an issue where trailing slashes wouldn’t be stripped when generating ServiceProfile resources through linkerd profile --open-api (#11519)

CLI

  • Improved CLI error handling to print differentiated error information when versioncheck.linkerd.io cannot be resolved (#11377; fixes #11349)
  • Introduced a new multicluster check --timeout flag to limit the time allowed for Kubernetes API calls (#11420; fixes #11266)
  • Changed linkerd install error output to add a newline when a Kubernetes client cannot be successfully initialised (#11917)

Manifests config / Helm

  • Introduced Helm configuration values for liveness and readiness probe timeouts and delays (#11458; fixes #11453)
  • Added probes to the debug container to appease environments requiring probes for all containers (#11308; fixes #11307)
  • Added a prometheusUrl field for the heartbeat job in the control plane Helm chart (#11343; fixes #11342)
  • Added a createNamespaceMetadataJob Helm value to control whether the namespace-metadata job is run during install (#11782)
  • Added a podAnnotations Helm value to allow adding additional annotations to the Linkerd-Viz Prometheus Deployment (#11374; fixes #11365)
  • Added namespaceSelector fields for the tap-injector and jaeger-injector webhooks. The webhooks are now configured to skip kube-system by default (#11649; fixes #11647)
  • Added a validating webhook config for httproutes.gateway.networking.k8s.io resources (#11150; fixes #11116)
  • Added support for config merge and Deployment environment to opentelemetry-collector in the jaeger extension (#11283)
  • Introduced support for arbitrary labels in the podMonitors field in the control plane Helm chart (#11222; fixes #11175)
  • Introduced PodDisruptionBudgets in the linkerd-viz Helm chart for tap and tap-injector (#11628; fixes #11248)
  • Allowed the MutatingWebhookConfig timeout value to be configured (#12028; fixes #12011)
  • Added nodeAffinity to deployment templates in the linkerd-viz and linkerd-jaeger Helm charts (#11464; fixes #10680)

preview-24.1.5

January 31, 2024
  • Added Argo Rollouts support to linkerd policy generate CLI command
  • Modified linkerd policy generate CLI command to only generate policy for enterprise and preview proxies

enterprise-2.14.8-1

January 14, 2024
  • Introduce a new linkerd fips audit CLI command, to audit FIPS compliance on Linkerd-enabled clusters

preview-24.1.1

January 13, 2024
  • Initial release of Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd preview channel
  • Introduce a new linkerd fips audit CLI command, to audit FIPS compliance on Linkerd-enabled clusters
  • Introduce Buoyant license requirement, please obtain a license from https://enterprise.buoyant.io

enterprise-2.13.7-9

January 3, 2024
  • Updated Go protojson dependency to remediate CWE-121
  • Fixed an issue with ARM-based proxy containers failing to start

enterprise-2.14.6-0

December 7, 2023
  • Initial release of 2.14.6
  • Fixed an issue where linkerd inject would unnecessarily set a config.linkerd.io/init-image-version annotation

enterprise-2.13.7-8

December 7, 2023
  • Fixed an issue where linkerd inject would unnecessarily set a config.linkerd.io/init-image-version annotation

enterprise-2.13.7-6

November 17, 2023
  • Updated proxy-init image to remediate CVE-2023-5678
  • The FIPS build now includes a FIPS policy-controller. All core control plane components are now FIPS compliant.

enterprise-2.14.3-1

November 10, 2023
  • Updated proxy-init image to remediate CVE-2023-5363
  • The FIPS build now includes a FIPS policy-controller. All core control plane components are now FIPS compliant.