Audience
Enterprises searching for an eBPF-based networking, observability, and security solution
About Cilium
Cilium is open-source software for providing, securing and observing network connectivity between container workloads, cloud native, and fueled by the revolutionary Kernel technology eBPF. Kubernetes doesn't come with an implementation of Load Balancing. This is usually left as an exercise for your cloud provider or in private cloud environments an exercise for your networking team. Cilium can attract this traffic with BGP and accelerate leveraging XDP and eBPF. Together these technologies provide a very robust and secure implementation of load balancing. Cilium and eBPF operate at the kernel layer. With this level of context, we can make intelligent decisions about how to connect different workloads whether on the same node or between clusters. With eBPF and XDP Cilium enables significant improvements in latency and performance and eliminates the need for Kube-proxy entirely.
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Constellation is a CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution that leverages confidential computing to encrypt and isolate entire clusters, protecting data at rest, in transit, and during processing, by running control and worker planes within hardware-enforced trusted execution environments. It ensures workload integrity through cryptographic certificates and supply-chain security mechanisms (SLSA Level 3, sigstore-based signing), passes Center for Internet Security Kubernetes benchmarks, and uses Cilium with WireGuard for granular eBPF traffic control and end-to-end encryption. Designed for high availability and autoscaling, Constellation delivers near-native performance on all major clouds and supports rapid setup via a simple CLI and kubeadm interface. It implements Kubernetes security updates within 24 hours, offers hardware-backed attestation and reproducible builds, and integrates seamlessly with existing DevOps tools through standard APIs.
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Tetragon
Tetragon is a flexible Kubernetes-aware security observability and runtime enforcement tool that applies policy and filtering directly with eBPF, allowing for reduced observation overhead, tracking of any process, and real-time enforcement of policies. eBPF enables deep observability with low-performance overhead, mitigating risks without the latency introduced by user-space processing. Tetragon extends Cilium's design by recognizing workload identities like namespace and pod metadata, surpassing traditional observability. It offers pre-defined policy libraries for rapid deployment and operational insight, reducing setup time and complexity at scale. Tetragon blocks malicious activities at the kernel level, closing the window for exploitation without succumbing to TOCTOU attack vectors. Synchronous monitoring, filtering, and enforcement are performed entirely within the kernel using eBPF.
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Project Calico
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KubeArmor
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Cilium
cilium.io
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