Scale By The Bay 2019: Charles Pretzer, Linkerd and the Service Mesh

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference In this talk, Charles Pretzer will present an overview of Linkerd, a "service mesh" for Kubernetes, and describe Linkerd's evolution over the years from a a 1.x branch in Scala, Finagle, Netty, and the JVM, to its modern 2.x incarnation in Go and Rust. Charles will cover the service mesh model and how Linkerd implements it, as well as lessons learned over almost four years of production experience at companies around the world. Charles Pretzer Linkerd Field Engineer Charles Pretzer is a field engineer at Buoyant, where he spends his time collaborating and engaging with the open source community of the CNCF service mesh, linkerd. He also enables production level adoption by helping companies integrate linkerd into their Kubernetes based applications. Charles has spoken at meetups and conferences hosted by ABN Amro, Macnica, and NGINX Conf. When he's not presenting or in front of a computer, he's riding a motorcycle or making a delicious mess in the kitchen.