Cilium Mesh Introduction & AMA

Cilium Mesh - One Mesh to Connect Them All. Connect Kubernetes, VMs, and Servers across Cloud, On-Prem, and Edge.

Cilium is an open source software for transparently securing the network connectivity between application services deployed using Linux container management platforms like Docker and Kubernetes. At the foundation of Cilium is a new Linux kernel technology called eBPF, which enables the dynamic insertion of powerful security visibility and control logic within Linux itself. Because eBPF runs inside the Linux kernel, Cilium security policies can be applied and updated without any changes to the application code or container configuration. In this interactive, hands-on lab we provide you a fully fledged Cilium installation on a small cluster and a few challenges to solve. See for yourself how Cilium works and how it can help you by securing a moon-sized battlestation in a “Star Wars”-inspired challenge.

With the rise of Kubernetes adoption, an increasing number of clusters is deployed for various needs, and it is becoming common for companies to have clusters running on multiple cloud providers, as well as on-premise. Kubernetes Federation has for a few years brought the promise of connecting these clusters into multi-zone layers, but latency issues are more often than not preventing such architectures. Cilium Cluster Mesh allows you to connect the networks of multiple clusters in such as way that pods in each cluster can discover and access services in all other clusters of the mesh, provided all the clusters run Cilium as their CNI. This allows to effectively join multiple clusters into a large unified network, regardless of the Kubernetes distribution each of them is running. In this lab, we will see how to set up Cilium Cluster Mesh, and the benefits from such an architecture.