Load Balancing

Linkerd uses an algorithm called EWMA, or exponentially weighted moving average, to automatically send requests to the fastest endpoints. This load balancing can improve end-to-end latencies.

For destinations that are in Kubernetes, Linkerd will look up the IP address in the Kubernetes API. If the IP address corresponds to a Service, Linkerd will load balance across the endpoints of that Service and apply any policy from that Service’s Service Profile. On the other hand, if the IP address corresponds to a Pod, Linkerd will not perform any load balancing or apply any .

If working with headless services, endpoints of the service cannot be retrieved. Therefore, Linkerd will not perform load balancing and instead route only to the target IP address.

Load balancing gRPC