We are excited to announce the availability of Azure CNI powered by Cilium. This new dataplane comes out of a collaboration of Microsoft and Isovalent and combines Cilium with the existing control plane of Azure CNI to bring a high-performance eBPF-based dataplane with extensive security and observability capabilities to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Benefits
By making use of eBPF programs loaded into the Linux kernel and a more efficient API object structure, Azure CNI Powered by Cilium provides the following benefits:
- Functionality equivalent to existing Azure CNI and Azure CNI Overlay plugins
- Faster service routing
- More efficient network policy enforcement
- Better observability of cluster traffic
- Support for larger clusters (more nodes, pods, and services)
Users of Cilium benefit from the new and improved Azure CNI control plane with improved IP Address Management (IPAM) and even better integration into Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Users of AKS benefit from the full feature set of Cilium.
Getting Started
Azure CNI powered by Cilium is available today for testing as a public preview. Follow the instructions in the Azure documentation on how to create your first AKS cluster powered natively with CIlium.
As you get your cluster up and running, you can see Cilium running and powering your AKS cluster!
To learn more, attend the KubeCon 2022 NA session Cilium Updates on Wednesday, October 26 • 5:25pm – 6:00pm and hear from Chandan Aggarwal, Principal Software Engineering Manager, Azure Container Networking, Microsoft.
Further Reading
