Every year, eBPF Summit brings the community together to share knowledge, exchange ideas, and celebrate what’s possible with eBPF. It’s an opportunity for practitioners, contributors, and curious newcomers alike to learn from each other and explore the ever-expanding boundaries of how this technology is being used.
This year, we’re doing something a little different. Instead of the usual lineup of talks and keynotes, eBPF Summit 2025 will be a Hackathon, and we want to see you get creative!
Unleash the Power of eBPF
eBPF Summit: Hackathon Edition invites you to roll up your sleeves and build. Whether you’re crafting your very first eBPF program, showing off an idea for a new eBPF-based utility, writing a blog post to help others get started, or adding new features for projects like Cilium, Tetragon, and Hubble, this is your opportunity to contribute in your own way.
And while there will be swag and fun prizes to recognise stand-out projects, the real reward is the chance to showcase your ideas to the eBPF community, and get feedback from experienced contributors. We’ve got an impressive line-up of judges who will assess the entries.
How to Join
The hackathon is open to everyone, and you can work alone or in a team. You don’t need to be a kernel wizard to participate. We welcome all forms of creativity — from CLI tools and observability dashboards, to documentation improvements, tutorials, and demos. Here are a handful of ideas to spark inspiration:
- Create a Grafana dashboard to show Cilium, Hubble or Tetragon metrics in a new way
- Write a tool to make it easier to create Tetragon Tracing Policies or Cilium Network Policies
- Write a blog post demystifying Tetragon tracing for security teams
- Craft your first XDP program to monitor a specific type of network traffic
- Design a tutorial for some use-case of Cilium or another eBPF-based tool
- Last year we showed that eBPF is Turing complete. What can you do with eBPF that hasn’t been done before?
You’ll submit your project in the form of a public GitHub repository, blog post, or resource, along with a README and short demo video. You can learn more about the requirements and categories on the eBPF Summit: Hackathon Edition page on DevPost, where you can submit your entries.
What not to submit
Let’s agree that this hackathon shouldn’t add unnecessary toil to open source project maintainers. Whenever anyone creates a PR on an existing open source project, the change has to be reviewed, and that takes time. We really don’t want to see trivial submissions like minor code re-formatting or typo corrections, where the benefit to the project is outweighed by the work required to accept the change. Likewise, we don’t want to see entries that copy existing work, or make only superficial modifications.
Let’s show off what humans can do - please don’t create AI Slop! AI tools can provide useful assistance, but we really want to see work that you have invented, coded, or written yourself - and most importantly, what you have learned along the way. That’s why we’re insisting on a video to accompany each submission - it’s your chance to talk us through your work, tell us about your experiences creating it, and show us that it’s you, and not an AI, that conceived and understands the work you’re submitting.
eBPF Summit, Reinvented
eBPF Summit has always been about exploring new frontiers with eBPF, and growing the community that are building and using it. Talks and presentations are fantastic for sharing knowledge — and we’ll still have plenty of those throughout the year at events like KubeCon, CiliumCon, and of course the eCHO livestream.
Dedicating this year’s Summit to a Hackathon creates a unique opportunity for you to show off your knowledge and creativity. We hope you enjoy this chance to get hands-on, experiment, and show what’s possible when curiosity meets open source. We can’t wait to see what you’ll build!
👉 Sign up for the eBPF Summit: Hackathon Edition here!
Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer
Liz Rice is Chief Open Source Officer with eBPF pioneers Isovalent, creators of the Cilium project, and now part of Cisco. which provides cloud native networking, observability and security. She is an award-winning speaker, and the author of O'Reilly books on "Container Security" and "Learning eBPF". She has held many roles with the CNCF, including as a governing board member, chair of the Technical Oversight Committee, and Co-Chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. When not writing code, or talking about it, Liz loves riding bikes in places with better weather than her native London, and making music under the pseudonym Insider Nine.
Duffie Cooley, Field CTO Isovalent & CNCF Ambassador
I am a generalist. I prefer to work in a fast paced deeply technical atmosphere. I believe that if you can't teach a thing then you don't understand it. I enjoy working with engineering focused companies/teams as they tend to align with my values pretty well. I have a strong preference for test driven methodologies. Technologies like Kubernetes, Mesos, Openstack, and Docker. All have a place in creating a new world for ops and engineering teams, and I am excited about it. Where we are headed. The engineering and systems role is very different. I enjoy working with these teams and helping to facilitate the transition to new technologies.