What is Cilium?
Thomas Graf, Cilium's co-creator as well as Isovalent's co-founder and CTO, provides a quick explanation of what Cilium is.
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Cilium is cloud-native networking, and it consists of several components. Starting with Kubernetes networking, it connects pods and containers together, and then provides security functionality on top of that, such as micro-segmentation, encryption, and connecting multiple clusters together. But it is more than that. It also has an observability component called Hubble, which gives us flow logs, metrics, and a Grafana dashboard.
Cilium also has a built-in Ingress and Gateway API controller, which gives us layer 7 load balancing. Very excitingly, it is a service mesh that is sidecar-free and blazingly fast. Additionally, there is a component called Tetragon, which provides runtime security.
What is unique about Cilium is that it's eBPF-based, which is what makes it high performance and highly scalable, providing us with observability that was never possible before.
Thomas Graf, CTO & Co-Founder Isovalent, Co-Creator Cilium, CTO & VP Engineering Cisco Security
August 1, 2023