Cilium

Cilium is an open-source, cloud-native networking, security, and observability solution for container workloads, particularly for Kubernetes. It leverages eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) technology within the Linux kernel to provide high-performance network connectivity, fine-grained…

Key facts

First appeared
2017
Category
cloud_infrastructure
Problem solved
Cilium was created to address the limitations of traditional IP-address-based networking and security in highly dynamic, ephemeral container and microservices environments. It provides identity-based security, deep observability, and API-aware network policy enforcement that older CNI plugins and firewall solutions struggled to offer at scale and performance in cloud-native infrastructure.
Platforms
Linux (kernel 4.9+), Kubernetes, Any environment running containerized workloads on Linux, OpenShift

Related technologies

Notable users

  • Sky
  • Datadog
  • AWS
  • Adobe
  • Google
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Bell