Let's take a closer look at the data plane architecture:

From the preceding diagram, we can see the following:

• Service-A is the edge service that receives traffic from an external network.
• Service-A calls Service-B, which calls two other services, such as Service-C and Service-D.
• Finally, Service-D calls Service-E.

A mesh of the Linkerd proxy at the application level forms the data plane, which can be configured, monitored, and observed through the control plane.

By now, you should have a good understanding of Linkerd's control plane and data plane regarding services that are deployed and how they're managed through the UI dashboard or CLI. The next section will take you through Linkerd's sidecar proxy architecture.