Connecting Kubernetes services with linkerd

How exactly? My $BIGCORP employer has an exactly same problem - a simple user-initiated request has to wind its way through many services (that I won't really call 'micro' in many cases) and the overall emergent behavior is often surprising.

Some of it can be mitigated in a decentralized way by over-provisioning and by making sure that retry policies are not provoking vicious loops (when most services are stuck retrying requests that have long since timed out on an upper level). But that can only be done to a certain degree.

My only personal objection coming from high-traffic service experience, is that this service should be designed as a metadata side-channel and leave the actual HTTP (or whatever) requests to individual services.