Hi, I’m Ivan Porta. I’m a Customer Engineer at Buoyant living in Seoul, South Korea.
Over the years I’ve helped large and small organizations adopt Linkerd, tune it for production traffic, and even peek under the hood when things got interesting.

Linkerd is famously simple to install and operate, but that apparent simplicity masks a lot of sophisticated engineering:

• Annotations configure everything from proxy behavior to control-plane policies.
• Features such as mTLS, protocol detection, circuit breaking, rate limiting, and multi-cluster communication all rely on carefully orchestrated interactions between the proxy and control-plane controllers.
• Underneath it all, Kubernetes resources—CRDs, webhooks, leases, and more—quietly do the heavy lifting.

Most tutorials stop at the “happy path.”
This course is different. We’ll dissect every moving part—down to the source code and Kubernetes API calls—so you can:

1. Understand exactly why Linkerd behaves the way it does.
2. Diagnose problems in production with confidence.
3. Extend or integrate Linkerd features in your own environment.

Each module is hands-on, self-contained, and designed to run on a local k3d cluster.
Copy, paste, and experiment at your own pace.

Feedback, questions, or wild feature ideas?
Open an issue in the course repository or reach out on Slack(@gtrekter).
Let’s make service-mesh internals a little less mysterious—together.