Cilium (computing)

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Cilium
Original author(s)Thomas Graf,
Daniel Borkmann,
André Martins,
Madhusudan Challa[1]
Developer(s)Open source community, Isovalent, Google, Datadog, Red Hat,
Cloud Native Computing Foundation[2]
Initial releaseDecember 16, 2015; 8 years ago (2015-12-16)[1]
Stable release
1.15 / 31 January 2024 (2024-01-31)[3]
Repositorygithub.com/cilium
Written inGo, eBPF, C, C++
Operating systemLinux, Windows[4]
Platformx86-64, ARM[5]
Available inEnglish
TypeCloud-native Networking, Security, Observability
LicenseApache License 2.0,
Dual GPL-2.0-only or BSD-2-clause for eBPF[6]
Websitecilium.io

Cilium is a cloud native technology for networking, observability, and security.[1] It is based on the kernel technology eBPF, originally for better networking performance, and now leverages many additional features for different use cases. The core networking component has evolved from only providing a flat Layer 3 network for containers to including advanced networking features, like BGP and Service mesh, within a Kubernetes cluster, across multiple clusters, and connecting with the world outside Kubernetes.[1] Hubble was created as the network observability component and Tetragon was later added for security observability and runtime enforcement.[1] Cilium runs on Linux and is one of the first eBPF applications being ported to Microsoft Windows through the eBPF on Windows project.[7]

History[edit]

Evolution from Networking CNI

Cilium began as a networking CNI[8] for container workloads. It was originally IPv6 only and supported multiple container orchestrators, like Kubernetes. The original vision for Cilium was to build an intent and identity-based high-performance container networking platform.[9] As the cloud native ecosystem expanded, Cilium added new projects and features to address new problems in the space.

The table below summarises some of the most significant milestones of this evolution:

  • December 2015 - Initial commit to the Cilium project[10]
  • May 2016 - Network policy was added, expanding the scope beyond just networking[11]
  • August 2016 - Cilium was initially announced during LinuxCon as a project providing fast IPv6 container networking with eBPF and XDP.[9] Today, Cilium has been adopted by major cloud provider's Kubernetes offerings and is one of the most widely used CNIs.
  • August 2017 - ebpf-go was created as a library to read, modify, and load eBPF programs and attach them to various hooks.[12]
  • April 2018 - Cilium 1.0 is the first stable release[13]
  • November 2019 - Hubble was launched to provide eBPF-based observability to network flows[14]
  • August 2020 - Chosen by Google as the basis for their Kubernetes Dataplane v2[15]
  • September 2021 - AWS picks Cilium for Networking & Security on EKS Anywhere[16]
  • October 2021 - Pwru was launched for tracing network packets in the Linux kernel with advanced filtering capabilities[17][18]
  • October 2021 - Accepted into CNCF as an incubation level project[19]
  • December 2021 - Cilium Service Mesh launched to help manage traffic between services[20]
  • May 2022 - Tetragon open sourced to cover security observability and runtime enforcement[21][22]
  • October 2022 - Chosen as CNI for Azure[23][24]
  • April 2023 - Cilium Mesh launched to connect workloads and machines across cloud, on-prem, and edge[25][26][27]
  • April 2023 - First CiliumCon hosted as a part of KubeCon[28]
  • October 2023 - Cilium becomes a CNCF Graduated project [29]

CNCF[edit]

Cilium was accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation on October 13th, 2021 as an incubation-level project. It applied to become a graduated project on October 27th 2022.[19] It became a Graduated project one year later. Cilium is one of the fastest-moving projects in the CNCF ecosystem.[30]

Adoption[edit]

Cilium has been adopted by many large-scale production users, including over 100 that have stated it publicly,[31] for example:

  • Datadog uses Cilium as their CNI and kube-proxy replacement[32][33]
  • Ascend uses Cilium as their one CNI across multiple cloud providers[34]
  • Bell Canada uses Cilium and eBPF for telco networking[35][36]
  • Cosmonic uses Cilium for their Nomad-based PaaS[37][38][39]
  • IKEA uses Cilium for their self-hosted bare-metal private cloud[40]
  • S&P Global uses Cilium as its CNI[41]
  • Sky uses Cilium as their CNI and for network security[42]
  • The New York Times uses Cilium on EKS for multi-region multi-tenant shared clusters[43]
  • Trip.com uses Cilium both on premise and in AWS[44]

Cilium is the CNI for many cloud providers including Alibaba,[45] APPUiO,[46] Azure,[47] AWS,[16] DigitalOcean,[48] Exoscale,[49] Google Cloud,[15] Hetzner,[50] and Tencent Cloud.[51]

Projects Overview[edit]

Cilium[edit]

Cilium began as a container networking project. With the growth of Kubernetes and container orchestration, Cilium became a CNI,[8] providing basic things like configuring container network interfaces and Pod to Pod connectivity. From the beginning, Cilium based its networking on eBPF rather than iptables or IPVS, betting that eBPF would become the future of cloud native networking.[52]

Cilium’s eBPF based dataplane provides a simple flat Layer 3 network with the ability to span multiple clusters in either a native routing or overlay mode with Cilium Cluster Mesh. It is Layer 7-protocol aware and can enforce network policies on Layer 3 to Layer 7 and with FQDN 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,[53] using XDP, socket-based load-balancing and efficient hash tables in eBPF. It also supports advanced functionality like integrated ingress and egress gateways,[54] bandwidth management, a stand-alone load balancer, and service mesh.[55]

Cilium is the first CNI to support advanced kernel features such as BBR TCP congestion control[56] and BIG TCP[57] for Kubernetes Pods.[58]

Hubble[edit]

Hubble is the observability, service map, and UI of Cilium which is shipped with the CNI.[59] [60] It can be used to observe individual network packet flows, view network policy decisions to allow or block traffic, and build up service maps showing how Kubernetes services are communicating.[61] Hubble can export this data to Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, and Fluentd for further analysis of Layer 3/4 and Layer 7 metrics.[62]

Tetragon[edit]

Tetragon is the security observability and runtime enforcement project of Cilium.[63] Tetragon is a flexible Kubernetes-aware security observability and runtime enforcement tool that applies policy and filtering directly with eBPF. It allows users to monitor and observe the complete lifecycle of every process execution on their machine, translate policies for file monitoring, network observability, container security, and more into eBPF programs, and do synchronous monitoring, filtering, and enforcement completely in the kernel.

Go eBPF Library[edit]

ebpf-go is a pure-Go library to interact with the eBPF subsystem in the Linux kernel.[64] It has minimal external dependencies, emphasises reliability and compatibility, and is widely deployed in production.

Pwru[edit]

pwru ("Packet, where are you?") is an eBPF-based tool for tracing network packets in the Linux kernel with advanced filtering capabilities. It allows fine-grained introspection of kernel state to facilitate debugging network connectivity issues. Under the hood, pwru attaches eBPF debugging programs to all Linux kernel functions which are responsible for processing network packets.

This gives a user finer-grained view into a packet processing in the kernel than with tcpdump, Wireshark, or more traditional tools. Also, it can show packet metadata such as network namespace, processing timestamp, internal kernel packet representation fields, and more.

Community[edit]

Cilium's official website lists online forums, messaging platforms, and in-person meetups for the Cilium user and developer community.

Conferences[edit]

Conferences dedicated to Cilium development in the past have included:

  • CiliumCon EU 2023,[28] held in conjunction with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2023[65]
  • CiliumCon NA 2023,[66] held in conjunction with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2023[67]

Annual Report[edit]

The Cilium community releases an annual report to cover how the community developed over the course of the year:

  • Cilium Annual Report 2022: Year of the CNI[68]
  • Cilium Annual Report 2023: Year of Graduation[69]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c d e "The Cilium Story - Why We Created Cilium - Thomas Graf, Isovalent, CiliumCon EU 2023". YouTube. 10 June 2023. Retrieved 7 July 2023.
  2. ^ "Announcing the Cilium annual report". CNCF. 26 January 2023. Retrieved 7 July 2023.
  3. ^ "Cilium Stable Releases". GitHub. 10 February 2023. Retrieved 10 February 2023.
  4. ^ "Getting Linux based eBPF programs to run with eBPF for Windows". cloudblogs.microsoft.com. 7 July 2023. Retrieved 7 July 2023.
  5. ^ "Supported Architectures for Cilium". GitHub. 7 July 2023. Retrieved 7 July 2023.
  6. ^ "Cilium License". GitHub. 7 July 2023. Retrieved 7 July 2023.
  7. ^ "ebpf for windows on GitHub". GitHub. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  8. ^ a b "CNI". cni.dev. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  9. ^ a b "Cilium Fast IPV6 Container Networking with BPF and XDP". Slideshare. 28 May 2016. Retrieved 24 August 2016.
  10. ^ "Cilium Initial Commit". GitHub. 16 December 2015. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  11. ^ "Network Policy added to Cilium". GitHub. 28 May 2016. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  12. ^ "ebpf-go Initial Commit". GitHub. 29 August 2017. Retrieved 24 August 2016.
  13. ^ "Cilium 1.0 Advances Container Networking With Improved Security". eWeek.com. 24 April 2018. Retrieved 13 July 2023.
  14. ^ "Announcing Hubble - Network, Service & Security Observability for Kubernetes". Cilium.io. 19 November 2019. Retrieved 24 August 2016.
  15. ^ a b "New GKE Dataplane V2 increases security and visibility for containers". Google Cloud Platform. 20 August 2020. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  16. ^ a b "AWS Picks Cilium As Networking And Security Layer". tfir.io. 13 September 2021. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  17. ^ "pwru Initial Commit". GitHub. 12 October 2021. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  18. ^ "Going from Packet Where Aren't You to pwru". Cilium.io. 8 February 2023. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  19. ^ a b "Cilium joins CNCF as an incubating project". CNCF. 13 October 2021. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  20. ^ "Cilium 1.12 Adds Cilium Service Mesh And Other New Features For Enterprise Kubernetes". tfir.io. 21 July 2022. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  21. ^ "Tetragon – eBPF-based Security Observability & Runtime Enforcement". Isovalent.com. 16 May 2022. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  22. ^ "Tetragon – eBPF-based Security Observability & Runtime Enforcement". thenewstack.io. 16 July 2022. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  23. ^ Bansal, Deepak (2022-12-05). "Microsoft and Isovalent partner to bring next generation eBPF dataplane for cloud-native applications in Azure". Microsoft Azure Blog. Retrieved 2024-02-06.
  24. ^ Ke, Deepak Bansal, Qi (2023-06-22). "Azure CNI with Cilium: Most scalable and performant container networking in the Cloud". Microsoft Azure Blog. Retrieved 2024-02-06.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  25. ^ "Cilium Mesh – One Mesh to Connect Them All". Isovalent.com. 19 May 2022. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  26. ^ "Isovalent's Cilium Mesh bridges gap between Kubernetes and legacy workloads". siliconangle.com. 5 May 2023. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  27. ^ "Isovalent introduces Isovalent Cilium Mesh to Securely Connect Networks Across On-Prem, Edge, and Cloud". finance.yahoo.com. 17 April 2023. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  28. ^ a b "CiliumCon Europe 2023". Linux Foundation. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  29. ^ https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2023/10/11/cloud-native-computing-foundation-announces-cilium-graduation/
  30. ^ "A look at the 2022 velocity of CNCF, Linux Foundation, and top 30 open source projects". Cloud Native Computing Foundation. 11 January 2023. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  31. ^ "Who is using Cilium?". GitHub. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  32. ^ "Datadog". Cloud Native Computing Foundation. 2022-10-11. Retrieved 2023-07-12.
  33. ^ "Tales from an eBPF Program's Murder Mystery - Hemanth Malla & Guillaume Fournier, Datadog". YouTube. 2022-10-11. Retrieved 2023-07-12.
  34. ^ "Case Study: Ascend". Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  35. ^ "Why eBPF is changing the telco networking space – Daniel Bernier, Bell Canada". YouTube. 21 August 2021. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  36. ^ "Leveraging Cilium and SRv6 for Telco Networking - Daniel Bernier, Bell Canada". YouTube. 19 May 2022. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  37. ^ "Cosmonic User Story: Running Cilium on Nomad for Wasm Workloads". Cilium.io. 18 Jan 2023. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  38. ^ "Cosmonic Open Source Project Integrates Nomad and Cilium". CloudNativeNow.com. 26 May 2023. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  39. ^ "The Cosmonic Open Source Project Combines Cilium And Nomad". Opensourceforu.com. 30 May 2023. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  40. ^ "IKEA Private Cloud, eBPF Based Networking, Load Balancing, and Observability with Cilium". YouTube. 19 May 2022. Retrieved 13 July 2023.
  41. ^ "eBPF, a road to invisible network: S&P Global's Network Transformation Journey - Guru Ramamoorthy". YouTube. 4 October 2022. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  42. ^ "eBPF & Cilium at Sky – Sebastian Duff, Anthony Comtois, Jospeh Samuel, Sky". YouTube. 20 August 2021. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  43. ^ "Designing and Securing a Multi-Tenant Runtime Environment at the New York Times - Ahmed Bebars". YouTube. 20 April 2023. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  44. ^ "User Story - How Trip.com uses Cilium". Cilium.io. 5 February 2020. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  45. ^ "Cilium High Performance Cloud Native Network". Alibaba Cloud. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  46. ^ "Partnership with Isovalent". appuio.ch. 16 December 2021. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  47. ^ "General availability: Azure CNI powered by Cilium". Microsoft Azure. 30 May 2023. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  48. ^ "From Managed Kubernetes to App Platform: 1.5 Years of Cilium Usage at DigitalOcean" (PDF). ebpf.io. 28 October 2020. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  49. ^ "Cilium CNI & SKS". changelog.exoscale.com. 3 June 2022. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  50. ^ "Performance Testing Cilium Ingress at Hetzner Cloud". cilium.io. 5 January 2023. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  51. ^ "Tencent Cloud TKE-based on Cilium unified hybrid cloud container network". segmentfault.com. 1 July 2021. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  52. ^ "Why is the kernel community replacing iptables with BPF?". linux.com. 23 April 2018. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  53. ^ "Kubernetes Without kube-proxy". docs.cilium.io. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  54. ^ "Egress Gateway". docs.cilium.io. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  55. ^ "Cilium 1.12 GA: Cilium Service Mesh and other major new features for enterprise Kubernetes". Cloud Native Computing Foundation. 13 July 2022. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  56. ^ Cardwell, Neal; Cheng, Yuchung; Gunn, C. Stephen; Yeganeh, Soheil Hassas; Jacobson, Van (2016). "BBR: Congestion-Based Congestion Control". ACM Queue. 14, September–October: 20–53.
  57. ^ "tcp: BIG TCP implementation [LWN.net]". lwn.net. Retrieved 2023-07-12.
  58. ^ 100Gbit/S Clusters With Cilium: Building Tomorrows Networking- Daniel Borkmann & Nikolay Aleksandrov, retrieved 2023-07-12
  59. ^ "Hubble on Github". GitHub. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  60. ^ "Hubble Series (Part 1): Re-introducing Hubble". Isovalent.com. 5 June 2023. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  61. ^ "Service Map & Hubble UI". docs.cilium.io. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  62. ^ "Monitoring & Metrics". docs.cilium.io. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  63. ^ "Tetragon on Github". GitHub. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  64. ^ "ebpf-go on Github". GitHub. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  65. ^ "KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe". Linux Foundation Events. Retrieved 2023-07-12.
  66. ^ "CiliumCon North America 2023". events.linuxfoundation.com. Retrieved 11 July 2023.
  67. ^ "KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America". Linux Foundation Events. Retrieved 2023-07-12.
  68. ^ "Announcing the Cilium annual report". CNCF. 2023-01-26. Retrieved 2024-02-06.
  69. ^ "Cilium's 2023 annual report". CNCF. 2023-12-21. Retrieved 2024-02-06.

External links[edit]

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