Alex is a software engineer at Buoyant and a core contributor to Linkerd, the open source service mesh for cloud native applications. Prior to Buoyant, she worked at Twitter on core API infrastructure. She enjoys board games, type safety, and Tim Hortons.
Five Years of Cloud Native Rust
In 2018, the Linkerd project made a big, risky bet by choosing Rust — at the time, a new and unknown programming language — to implement the next generation of Linkerd proxies. Since then, the bet has paid off, with Linkerd reaping rewards in security, reliability, and performance, and by 2023, Rust has become increasingly popular in the cloud native ecosystem. It's easy to see why: Rust's compile-time memory safety prevents entire classes of CVEs, without sacrificing performance or productivity.
In this talk, Linkerd maintaine Alex Leong reflects on the project’s five years of experience with Rust in Kubernetes — how the project has benefited, how things have changed, and what we’ve learnt. In addition, Alex will look at Rust adoption throughout the cloud native ecosystem, including CNCF projects like TiKV, kube-rs, OpenTelemetry and gRPC. Looking back at the last five years of Rust in Kubernetes, attendees will learn how their projects can benefit from adopting Rust, too.
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