The service mesh technology is evolving fast, and Linkerd has an aggressive release schedule for rolling out new changes. Linkerd has two channels for their releases: stable releases for production, and edge releases. Edge releases have new features and functions, and they roll up in a stable release on maturity. 

We will only use stable releases in this book. By the time you read this book, there may be a new stable release already out there. The scripts that will be used in this section of this book will be regularly updated so that they correspond to the new releases of Linkerd. Please refer to https://github.com/servicemeshbook/linkerd for the updated scripts. However, we suggest that you select the version of Linkerd that's being used in this chapter so that everything's consistent with the hands-on exercises. 

Now, we will install the Linkerd control plane using the Linkerd CLI. But first, let's check the prerequisites.