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FYI Linkerd's Grafana dashboards are purely additive. If you don't like them, ignore them. We also work hard to make Linkerd incremental. It doesn't "touch eve

• jrockway 8y ago
  Not sure I agree. Running things in production is not free. There is resource usage, attack surface, learning curve, and the chance for something to go wrong. Especially prometheus; it is a high resource usage service using 2G of RAM on nodes that only have 3. I am happy to have one of those in my cluster, but an extra one "just because" actually costs something. Pods are not free either, at least not on Amazon. You get 18 pods per node (at least on t3.medium, which is what I use), and daemonsets quickly eat into that and make every additional node less useful as you increase cluster capacity. In a world where you're already running aws-node, kube-proxy, jaeger-agent, prometheus-node-exporter, and fluentd, you have to be judicious about the value of additional per-node services. I see the benefit in linkerd, but not all the extra stuff it comes with. Having an envoy cluster do gRPC load-balancing between services is enough; yes, you can't tcpdump the streams, it doesn't transparently add TLS, it doesn't configure itself through Kubernetes objects, and it doesn't quite insert the observability that linkerd does... but it does work well and comes with less tooling and resource cost.