Cilium
eBPF-based networking, security, and observability platform for Kubernetes that replaces traditional networking components with kernel-level performance.
- Actively maintained
- Foundation-backed
- Well documented
- Permissive license
Overview
Cilium uses eBPF - a Linux kernel technology - to implement Kubernetes networking, network policy enforcement, load balancing, and observability directly in the kernel, avoiding the performance overhead of traditional iptables-based networking. It's a CNCF graduated project that's become one of the most widely adopted Kubernetes CNI (networking) plugins.
Cilium is a fit for platform teams that want high-performance networking, fine-grained network security policy, and deep network observability for Kubernetes, complementing Istio (also in this catalog) - Cilium can operate at the networking layer alone or provide service-mesh capabilities without a sidecar proxy.
Why it's in this catalog
Catalog rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Leading eBPF-based Kubernetes networking/security layer.
- Foundational
- Foundation-governed
- Categories
- DevOps
- Languages
- Go
- License
- Apache-2.0
Related Projects
Falco
Apache-2.0CNCF runtime security tool that detects unexpected or malicious behavior in containers and hosts as it happens, using kernel-level monitoring.
Actively maintained
- DevOps
Linkerd
Apache-2.0Lightweight service mesh for Kubernetes focused on simplicity and low resource overhead, a genuine alternative to Istio.
Actively maintained
- DevOps
etcd
Apache-2.0Distributed, consistent key-value store that Kubernetes itself uses to store all cluster state, and a reliable building block for other distributed systems.
Actively maintained
- DevOps
Open Policy Agent (OPA)
Apache-2.0General-purpose, CNCF-graduated policy engine for enforcing authorization, compliance, and configuration rules as code across microservices, APIs, Kubernetes, and CI pipelines.
Actively maintained
- DevOps
Spotted an error? Suggest an edit on GitHub.