The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the graduation of Cilium.
Cilium is an eBPF-powered open source, cloud native solution for providing, securing, and observing network connectivity between workloads.
Cilium began as an eBPF-based implementation of the Container Networking Interface to provide Layer 3-4 connectivity between container workloads. It has since expanded to include capabilities like network policy, meshing multiple Kubernetes clusters together, replacing kube-proxy, providing network encryption, integrated ingress and egress gateway, bandwidth management, BGP, and connecting external workloads into Kubernetes. The Cilium project pioneered sidecarless service mesh, and its sub-project Hubble provides network observability for layers 3-7, metrics, service map, and UI, while Tetragon focuses on security observability and runtime enforcement.
"Cilium's graduation highlights its evolution from a simple CNI to a complete networking, observability, and security solution that prepares platforms and organizations for the next steps on their cloud native journey," said Thomas Graf, Cilium co-founder and CTO of Isovalent. "On behalf of the project, we wish to thank every contributor who has collectively brought us to graduation within CNCF."
Cilium was initially created by Isovalent and was built from the ground up based on eBPF. It became an Incubating CNCF project in October 2021 and now has maintainers from 7 different companies and over 800 individual contributors. The project powers some of the largest Kubernetes clusters in the world, with end users ranging from digital native startups to the world's largest financial institutions and telcos. It has 46 public case studies from companies, including Bell Canada, Bloomberg, DB Schenker, S&P Global, Sky, and The New York Times, and well over 100 organizations listed in its USERS file. Cilium is the second most active CNCF project in terms of the number of commits, behind only Kubernetes.
"eBPF has grown into a powerful technology for extending the Linux kernel to meet a variety of use cases," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. "Cilium and the modern eBPF stack will help shape the future of cloud native networking and observability. Cilium has demonstrated really impressive growth in its nearly two years in the Incubator, and we're excited to watch as the ecosystem continues to push the benefits of eBPF even further."
Graduation is not the end goal but rather the beginning of creating the ecosystem around Cilium. The project is growing beyond just Kubernetes to include support for external workloads, like bare metal and virtual machines. It was the first project to add support for Gateway API and includes a Layer 4 load balancer for north-south traffic. Cilium Service Mesh also enables workloads to mutually authenticate their connections using SPIFFE/SPIRE. Cilium now integrates with Prometheus and Grafana for simplified Day 2 operations.
"When embarking on a project, one can never predict its ultimate success, but the belief in its potential to address complex challenges is the driving force," said André Martins, Cilium maintainer. "Witnessing Cilium achieve CNCF graduation is a testament to the unwavering support the community has contributed over the years. With each passing year, as the community continues to grow and deepen its support, it instills a profound sense of confidence in more organizations to adopt and integrate it into their infrastructure. This graduation isn't the end; rather, it serves as a validation of the breakthroughs Cilium will pioneer in the years to come."
"From the earliest days of Kubernetes, we knew that a thriving ecosystem was a critical ingredient, and Cilium is perhaps the most visible demonstration of this. Cilium taps into the power and excitement of eBPF to super-charge Kubernetes networking," said Tim Hockin, distinguished software engineer at Google Cloud. "While it may have started as 'just a network plugin', Cilium has evolved into much more than that, with a broad feature set which speaks to many types of users from startups to major enterprises. I'm thrilled to see Cilium be successful – it's really a win for Kubernetes users everywhere."
To officially graduate from incubating status, the project underwent a due diligence process with the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), completed a third-party security audit, and drove the process to allow CNCF projects to include GPL-licensed eBPF code to run in the kernel. Graduation validates Cilium's growth, maturity, and future outlook and cements the project's leadership in the eBPF space.
The Latest
The consequences of outages have become a pressing issue as the largest IT outage in history continues to rock the world with severe ramifications ... According to the Catchpoint Internet Resilience Report, these types of disruptions, internet outages in particular, can have severe financial and reputational impacts and enterprises should strongly consider their resilience ...
Everyday AI and digital employee experience (DEX) are projected to reach mainstream adoption in less than two years according to the Gartner, Inc. Hype Cycle for Digital Workplace Applications, 2024 ...
When an IT issue is not handled correctly, not only is innovation stifled, but stakeholder trust can also be impacted (such as when there's an IT outage or slowdowns in performance). When you add new technology investments and innovations into the mix, you have a recipe for disaster ...
To get a better understanding of the top issues facing IT teams in financial services, Auvik recently released its 2024 Financial Services IT Trends Report ... Not surprisingly, the experience of FinServ IT teams is significantly impacted by the onslaught of cyberattacks facing financial services organizations as well as the complex regulatory environment of this industry ...
The CrowdStrike outage serves as a potent illustration of the risks associated with complex security environments. Enterprises are increasingly advised to consider simpler, more robust solutions that do not rely heavily on reactive security measures ...
When IT leaders started telling Enterprise Management Associates (EMA™) more than a year ago that their personnel were using premium ChatGPT subscriptions to create device configs and automation scripts, we knew the industry was on the verge of a revolution ...
The rapid rise of creative "right-brain" generative AI (GenAI) has opened the door to greater adoption of the more analytical "left-brain" AI decisioning solutions by global businesses, according to new research from Pegasystems ...
The majority of executives (61%) are harnessing the power of generative AI, with at least one application in production, and among these early adopters, 86% of those reported an increase in revenue, estimated at more than 6%, according to new global research from Google Cloud ...
Optimizing the performance of applications remains a top challenge for most organizations, particularly when those applications are spread across a hybrid IT estate that includes core, public cloud, and edge. Even if there were a magic performance wand, organizations would still need to know there was a problem and then do something about it — at Internet speed ...
According to Forrester's The Top 10 Emerging Technologies In 2024 report, generative AI (genAI) for visual content, genAI for language, TuringBots, and IoT security are the top emerging technologies that will deliver the most immediate ROI for businesses in 2024 and beyond ...