FEDERATING CLUSTERS FOR ZERO-DOWNTIME KUBERNETES

Summary from the TLDR DevOps newsletter

Linkerd's multicluster extension supports three modes for connecting Kubernetes clusters: federation, flat mirroring, and gateway mirroring. This post walks through running all three simultaneously across three GKE clusters, using a full-mesh topology of six directional links and a chaos test that scales an entire cluster to zero. Federated services redistribute traffic automatically when a cluster goes down, while mirrored services require the client to handle failover explicitly. The mode is set per service with a single label, so all three patterns can coexist on the same set of links.