Cilium (computing)
Cilium is a cloud native technology for networking, observability, and security. It is based on the kernel technology eBPF, originally for better networking performance, and now leverages many additional features for different use cases. The core networking component has evolved from only providing a flat Layer 3 network for containers to including advanced networking features, like BGP and Service mesh, within a Kubernetes cluster, across multiple clusters, and connecting with the world outside Kubernetes. Hubble was created as the network observability component and Tetragon was later added for security observability and runtime enforcement. Cilium runs on Linux and is one of the first eBPF applications being ported to Microsoft Windows through the eBPF on Windows project.
Command line session showing the status of a Cilium installation in a Kind cluster | |
Original author(s) | Thomas Graf, Daniel Borkmann, André Martins, Madhusudan Challa |
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Developer(s) | Open source community, Isovalent, Google, Datadog, Red Hat, Cloud Native Computing Foundation |
Initial release | December 16, 2015 |
Stable release | 1.15
/ 31 January 2024 |
Repository | github |
Written in | Go, eBPF, C, C++ |
Operating system | Linux, Windows |
Platform | x86-64, ARM |
Available in | English |
Type | Cloud-native Networking, Security, Observability |
License | Apache License 2.0, Dual GPL-2.0-only or BSD-2-clause for eBPF |
Website | cilium.io |