One downside to using Linkerd is that unless you have very few apps — or an overabundance of RAM — you can't realistically deploy it as a "sidecar container". The JVM consumes about 100MB of RAM, by their account; it's not lightweight.
The sidecar pattern (used by Envoy and by Google's new project, istio) is desirable in that it compartmentalizes the rules and logic in the pod that uses them, as opposed to sharing all settings across all apps. Zero dependencies (between pods) is a great way to manage complexity. I haven't thought much about it, but there might be latency benefits, too.
The sidecar pattern (used by Envoy and by Google's new project, istio) is desirable in that it compartmentalizes the rules and logic in the pod that uses them, as opposed to sharing all settings across all apps. Zero dependencies (between pods) is a great way to manage complexity. I haven't thought much about it, but there might be latency benefits, too.