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Linkerd Primer

Zero-trust service mesh for Meridian's control plane — mutual TLS, latency-aware load balancing, and tap-based observability without application changes.

Why Linkerd

Meridian's licensing backend spans multiple microservices (auth, validation, telemetry). Linkerd injects a Rust-based sidecar proxy into each pod, giving us mTLS between every service with zero code changes. The control plane runs on 300 MiB of memory — no Envoy, no JVM, no heavyweight CRDs.

Step 1 — Install the CLI

curl -sL https://run.linkerd.io/install | sh

Step 2 — Validate cluster

linkerd check --pre

Step 3 — Install control plane

linkerd install | kubectl apply -f -

Step 4 — Mesh your workloads

kubectl get deploy -o yaml | linkerd inject - | kubectl apply -f -

After injection, every pod gets an linkerd-proxy sidecar. Run linkerd viz install for the dashboard, then linkerd tap deploy/meridian-authto watch live gRPC streams between services.