The Cilium Honeycomb: Building Diversity, Community & Technical Excellence
Just like a beehive buzzing with life, the Cilium ecosystem thrives on collaboration, adaptability, and purpose. At CiliumCon 2025, I had the chance to share how this growing honeycomb — made of diverse use cases, environments, organizations, and people — is the real foundation of Cilium’s technical excellence. And yes, there was live Kahoot involved. 😉
If you missed the talk or want to relive the buzz, you can watch the full replay here.
In this post, I want to take you through that talk, and show you why Cilium isn’t just powerful networking tech — it’s an ecosystem with heart and wings.
⚙️ Use Cases: The Many Cells of the Hive
A healthy hive has many cells, each with a role. Cilium is no different. It supports a vibrant range of use cases. From managing massive-scale cloud networking to enabling fine-grained, identity-based security, Cilium operates with the precision of bees in perfectly aligned cells. It connects multi-cluster and multi-cloud environments with the same ease bees cross-pollinate distant fields. It’s the secure, high-performance foundation behind private clouds and high-demand applications.
All of this versatility makes Cilium more than a CNI — it’s a toolkit for building the next generation of connected applications. And fun fact? 95% of Cilium users run multiple Kubernetes clusters. That’s not just a number. It shows that people rely on Cilium when the stakes are high and the scale is real.
💐 Environments: Thriving Across Ecosystems
Bees don’t stick to one flower. And Cilium doesn’t stick to one environment. It thrives everywhere — across all major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba), on-premise data centers, inside edge computing environments, and even local dev clusters. Whether you’re deploying on bare metal, VMs, or containers, Cilium delivers consistency, reliability, and performance. That’s hive-grade adaptability.
👷♀️ Users: Who’s Building with Cilium?
The Cilium Honeycomb isn’t built in isolation. A whole swarm of organizations contribute to and rely on it in production. From Adobe, managing complex multi-tenant networks, to Capital One standardizing on secure Kubernetes networking, to DigitalOcean making Cilium the default in their managed Kubernetes service. Trendyol leverages Cilium for high-performance e-commerce, and Datadog continues to contribute from the observability side.
With 161 organizations publicly listed as adopters, Cilium has moved from promising newcomer to production-proven standard.
🤝 People: The Buzz Behind the Tech
A hive without bees is just wax. The true strength of Cilium lies in the people behind it. Over 926 contributors from around the world have made code contributions to the project. The CNCF ecosystem supports growth through initiatives like the Cilium Certified Associate (CCA) exam. And our Cilium Champions are the scout bees — spreading knowledge, hosting meetups, and mentoring new contributors.
At Isovalent, now part of Cisco, we remain deeply committed to this vibrant community. Cisco’s support has allowed us to stay true to what matters: technical excellence and a healthy hive culture.
We invest in diversity, equity, and inclusion as the foundation for innovation. We support remote flexibility to let our team thrive wherever they feel most productive. We believe in work-adventure balance (because bees need to fly and rest), and mental health and well-being as non-negotiable parts of sustainable open source.
We’re not just writing good code — we’re trying to build a community where people feel seen, supported, and excited to contribute.
Open source is about community and people.
🐝 Come Build the Hive With Us
The Cilium Honeycomb is buzzing with ideas, energy, and opportunity. Whether you’re deep in the ecosystem or just circling the flowers, there’s a place for you here.
And yes — we’re hiring. If you want to work on cutting-edge open source networking, with a team that believes in people as much as packets, come join the swarm.
Let’s keep building this hive together. 🐝
Donia Chaiehloudj is a Software Engineer at Isovalent, contributing to the development of Cilium especially on the network policy side. Passionate about building scalable and innovative systems, Donia also champions the values of diversity, collaboration, and open source, both in her technical work and community involvement.
She occasionally steps onto the stage as a public speaker, sharing insights on cloud-native networking, open source growth, and fostering inclusive communities.
Outside of work, Donia enjoys organising tech events, sewing, playing the clarinet and hiking.
