I'm delighted to share that my new LinkedIn Learning course, Cilium Essential Training: Hands-On Kubernetes Networking with eBPF, is now live.
If you work with Kubernetes, you have almost certainly come across Cilium, even if you did not realise it. Cilium has become the leading networking platform for Kubernetes. It is the default dataplane in Google Kubernetes Engine, it powers Azure's Cilium-based CNI, and it is available across every major cloud. It is the default in many Kubernetes distributions. It runs in production at some of the largest AI platforms and neoclouds. And it is the only CNI to have graduated within the CNCF, the level reserved for the most mature and widely adopted projects. All of it powered by eBPF.
There’s never been more reasons to learn about Cilium and there has never been more material to help you learn Cilium. We co-wrote the O'Reilly book Cilium: Up and Running, and you can download a free copy from Isovalent. We publish a steady stream of deep-dive blog posts. Our ever-growing library of free, browser-based hands-on labs have been used over 150,000 times. In total, we offer over 300 resources across Cilium, Tetragon and eBPF, in our Resource Library.
So why a course? Because sometimes you want a single, guided path. Someone to take you from an empty cluster to a secured, observable, encrypted application, one step at a time. That is exactly what this course does.
Who is it for
This course is for anyone who touches Kubernetes networking, and that is not always who you might expect. In our State of Kubernetes Networking Report 2025, we found that Kubernetes networking is mostly run by platform and infrastructure engineers, SREs and DevOps practitioners: 71% of platform engineers and 63% of DevOps engineers and SREs told us they work on it every week. On the other hand, only around 11% of respondents self-identified as network engineers - and among them, only 30% said they were actively involved in operating Kubernetes networking.
The course is written with both groups in mind. If you come from a cloud, platform, DevOps or SRE background, you will finally get a clear mental model of what is actually happening to your packets. If you come from a networking background, you will recognise familiar concepts - routing, load balancing, encryption and firewalling - applied to the cloud native world. The report's advice to network engineers was to deepen their Kubernetes networking skills, and this course is a good place to start.
It's a great fit if you want to build up your understanding of Cilium before you run it in production. It's also a solid foundation if you want to get comfortable with Kubernetes networking or if you are working towards a certification.
The Cilium content maps well to the Cilium Certified Associate (CCA), and the broader networking material will help you prepare for the Certified Kubernetes Network Engineer (CKNE). I was actively involved in developing the CKNE blueprint, and several of its competencies - CNI and IPAM, kube-proxy alternatives, Gateway API, network policy, encryption and observability - are covered in this course. Cilium and Hubble are also both listed among the tools that may feature in the exam. And if you want to go further on the CKNE, keep an eye out for our upcoming book, the CKNE Study Guide.
What the course covers
The introduction is free to watch, with no subscription needed: watch it on LinkedIn Learning.
The course is 37 videos and about two and a half hours, split into eight chapters. Each one builds on the last:
- Getting started. Install Cilium on a cluster, deploy an application, write your first network policy, and take an early look at Hubble.
- Cilium's architecture. The agent, the operator, Envoy, and the eBPF that sits underneath it all.
- IP Address Management. How Cilium gives every pod an address, and the different ways it can do it.
- The datapath. How a packet actually travels from one pod to another across the cluster.
- Service routing without kube-proxy. Replacing kube-proxy, routing traffic with the Gateway API, and load balancing.
- Network policy. Securing workloads from Layer 3 and 4 all the way up to Layer 7, DNS and FQDN-based rules.
- Transparent encryption. Encrypting pod-to-pod traffic on the wire with WireGuard.
- Observability with Hubble. Seeing every flow in your cluster, with Hubble CLI or Hubble UI.
It is an "Essentials" course, so I could not cover every single Cilium use case. But if the course is well-reviewed, I hope to build a follow-up to cover advanced networking use cases, such as Gateway API, BGP, Egress, Multi-Cluster and traffic optimization features.
Hands-on from start to finish
Every chapter comes with a companion GitHub repository and a ready-to-use GitHub Codespace, a full environment in your browser with nothing to install. You can replicate everything I teach in the course in your own sandbox.
Once you've completed the course, you can head over to Isovalent Labs and take one of the 50+ labs available across the Isovalent universe.
Watch it now
The course is live on LinkedIn Learning: Cilium Essential Training: Hands-On Kubernetes Networking with eBPF
LinkedIn Learning is a subscription service, but there are several ways in. You may already have access through your employer, your university or your local library, and LinkedIn Premium includes it. And anyone who has the course can share it with you on LinkedIn to unlock it for 24 hours, which is long enough to watch it from start to finish.
Finally, LinkedIn offers a one-month free trial, which is plenty for a two-and-a-half-hour course. I’ll also be doing “flash sales” and occasionally sharing free time-limited access to the course on my LinkedIn.
I truly hope you find this course useful and I look forward to hearing your feedback on it!
Nico Vibert, Principal Technical Marketing Engineer
Nico Vibert is a Principal Technical Marketing Engineer at Isovalent, the company behind the open-source cloud-native solution Cilium. Prior to joining Isovalent, Nico worked in many different roles - operations and support, design and architecture, and technical pre-sales - at companies such as HashiCorp, VMware, and Cisco. In his current role, Nico focuses primarily on creating content to make networking a more approachable field and regularly speaks at events like KubeCon and Cisco Live. Nico has held over 15 networking certifications, including the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert CCIE (# 22990). Nico is the co-author of the "Cilium: Up and Running" O'Reilly book and is the Lead Subject Matter Expert on the Cilium Certified Associate (CCA) certification.