
Linkerd2 has two basic components:
- a data plane comprised of lightweight proxies, which are deployed as sidecar containers alongside your service code
- a control plane of processes that coordinate and manage these proxies.
Humans interact with the Linkerd2 service mesh via the linkerd
command-line interface (CLI) or a web app that you use to control the cluster.
In this guide we will walk you through how to deploy Linkerd2 on your OpenShift cluster and how to set up a sample gRPC application.
That’s it! 👏
You may want to stick around and explore the Linkerd2 web console a bit more:
OK, so what's next? Well, from here you could:
- Check out the overview doc and the roadmap doc.
- Hop on the
#conduit
channel on the Linkerd Slack. - Browse through the Conduit forum.
- Follow @linkerd on Twitter.
If you want to try out even more Linkerd2 goodiness, check out Using Linkerd2 to debug a service where we walk you through how to use Linkerd2 to investigate poorly performing services.

Steps
Linkerd 2.0 - Getting Started on OpenShift
Step 1 - Setup the CLI
As this is your first time running Linkerd2, you’ll need to download the command-line interface (CLI) onto your machine. You’ll then use this CLI to install Linkerd2 on a Kubernetes cluster.
curl -k https://run.linkerd.io/install | sed -e 's/-sLO/-sLO -k/g' | sed -e 's/-sL \"/-sL -k \"/g' | sh
Next, add Linkerd2 to your path with:
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.linkerd2/bin
Verify that the CLI is installed and is running correctly with the following command:
linkerd version
With Server version: unavailable
, don’t worry, we haven’t added the control plane… yet.