TLDR Tech / DevOps
Federating clusters for zero-downtime Kubernetes
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.
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