About Cilium
Cilium is an open source project for networking, observability and security in cloud native environments. It uses eBPF in the Linux kernel to handle network traffic between workloads.
What it does
Cilium provides pod networking, load balancing and network policy for Kubernetes clusters. It shows service maps and network flow logs that identify traffic between workloads, and it can encrypt that traffic transparently. It can also replace kube-proxy and act as an implementation of the Gateway API, so you can manage routing with standard resources.
Key features
- Pod networking and network policy
- Layer 4 load balancing and kube-proxy replacement
- Service maps and network flow logs
- Transparent encryption between workloads
- Gateway API support
Who it's for
Platform and security engineers who run Kubernetes clusters and want networking rules and traffic visibility built into the Linux kernel.
Pricing and good to know
Cilium is free and released under the Apache License 2.0, and it is a CNCF graduated project. The website also lists enterprise options and case studies. Because it depends on Linux kernel features, it runs on Linux nodes.
Highlights
- Apply network policy to Kubernetes workloads
- Balance Layer 4 traffic and replace kube-proxy
- View service maps and network flow logs
- Encrypt traffic between workloads
- Route traffic with the Gateway API
