What problem it solves

Kubernetes environments need networking, load balancing, cross-cluster connectivity, identity-aware policy enforcement, service mesh capabilities, and operational visibility. Cilium addresses these needs through an eBPF-based dataplane that decouples security policies from network addressing and supports multiple routing and service-mesh approaches.

Key features

• Flexible Kubernetes networking — Cilium provides a flat Layer 3 network for Kubernetes clusters with overlay, native routing, and flexible routing options. It can automate route learning and advertisement in common network topologies.

  Source: README

• Distributed load balancing — Cilium performs distributed load balancing between application containers and for traffic to and from external services. Its eBPF implementation includes east-west and north-south balancing modes and can replace kube-proxy.

  Source: README

• Identity-aware network policy — Cilium assigns security identities to groups of application containers and enforces L3-L7 policies using those identities rather than relying on IP addresses. Policies can filter by labels, protocols, ports, DNS names, HTTP methods, URL paths, and gRPC calls.

  Source: README

• Multi-cluster connectivity — Cluster Mesh provides connectivity across multiple Kubernetes clusters, including global service discovery and a unified identity model. It is designed for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

  Source: README

• Service mesh and observability — Cilium includes transparent service-mesh encryption, L7-aware enforcement, Gateway API integration, Hubble service maps, flow visibility, metrics, alerting, drop reasons, and audit trails.

  Source: README

Who it may suit

This project may suit Kubernetes operators, platform engineers, and security teams managing container networking, policy enforcement, service meshes, or multi-cluster connectivity. It may also suit developers working with eBPF-based networking and observability.

Topics to discuss

• Which eBPF integration points offer the most useful extension points for new networking or security capabilities?

• How should teams choose between overlay and native routing for existing cluster infrastructure?

• What deployment patterns best combine Cluster Mesh, service mesh features, and identity-aware policy enforcement?

Written by ReadmeX AI from the project's README, source and public GitHub data; it may contain mistakes.

Read the original README https://github.com/cilium/cilium#readme

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