Cilium enhances Kubernetes networking with an eBPF dataplane, offering L3-L7 network policy enforcement and efficient load balancing that can replace kube-proxy. It provides integrated ingress/egress gateways, bandwidth management, and service mesh capabilities, all built on the high-efficiency eBPF technology.
What problem does it solve?
An eBPF-based solution for networking, security, and observability in Kubernetes.
Who should use it?
Kubernetes administrators and developers seeking advanced networking, security, and observability features for their containerized applications.
Setup difficulty:Medium
Pros
Identity-based security decoupled from IP addresses
L7 protocol-aware policy enforcement
Scalable load balancing replacing kube-proxy
Cons
Requires a Linux kernel with eBPF support
Can have a steeper learning curve due to eBPF concepts
Scores
Trust Score
77
Star reputation (15%)88
Star velocity 7d (15%)0
Commit recency (15%)100
Fork ratio (10%)51
Issue ratio (10%)59
Contributor signal (10%)100
README quality (5%)100
License (5%)100
Homepage/demo (5%)100
Docs URL (5%)0
Topic count (5%)100
Maintenance
73
Commit frequency95
Issue management25
Documentation85
Popularity
65
Stars100
Forks100
Growth trend10
Star History
Not enough data yet. Star history will appear after a few days of tracking.
Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution with an eBPF-based
dataplane. It provides a simple flat Layer 3 network with the ability to span
multiple clusters in either a native routing or overlay mode. It is L7-protocol
aware and can enforce network policies on L3-L7 using an identity-based security
model that is decoupled from network addressing.
Cilium implements distributed load balancing for traffic between pods and to
external services, and is able to fully replace kube-proxy, using efficient
hash tables in eBPF, allowing for almost unlimited scale. It also supports
advanced functionality like integrated ingress and egress gateway, bandwidth
management and service mesh, and provides deep network and security visibility and monitoring.
A new Linux kernel technology called eBPF_ is at the foundation of Cilium. It
supports dynamic insertion of eBPF bytecode into the Linux kernel at various
integration points such as: network IO, application sockets, and tracepoints to
implement security, networking and visibility logic. eBPF is highly efficient
and flexible. To learn more about eBPF, visit eBPF.io_.