Cilium is an open source project which provides networking, security and load balancing for containers by using eBPF and XDP technologies in the Linux kernel. It provides eBPF and XDP features to CRI-O, Docker and Kubernetes. This presentation shows an overview on Cilium, explains the concepts behind it and then provide the project update, as it reached the 1.0 milestone last year. The video from talk at FOSDEM 2019: https://video.fosdem.org/2019/H.2214/cilium_overview_and_updates.webm

1. Cilium - overview and recent updates
Michal Rostecki
Software Engineer
mrostecki@suse.com

2. What is Cilium?

3. BPF
From https://github.com/cilium/cilium

4. Cilium architecture
From https://github.com/cilium/cilium

5. What’s new in Cilium?

6. Cilium releases
FOSDEM 2018 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 FOSDEM 2019 1.40.12
10.2017 02.2018 04.2018

7. 1.0 milestone
● Guarantee of:
○ API stability
○ LTS releases
○ Downgrades and upgrades

8. Istio integration
From https://cilium.io/blog

9. Support for additional container runtimes

10. Prometheus metrics
From https://cilium.io/blog

11. Clustermesh
From https://cilium.io/blog

12. Key-value store
agent agent agent agent

13. BGP support: integration with Kube-router
● CNI plugin ❌
● Fetching cluster IPs of services
from Kubernetes API ✓
● Advertising cluster IPs of
services ✓
● CNI plugin ✓
● Handling Network Policies ✓

14. Support for:

15. Incoming in 1.4

16. Multi-cluster services
From https://cilium.io/blog

17. Cilium running on top of Flannel
...and in future maybe on top of some other CNI plugins!
● Allocates IP addresses
● Creates veth pairs for each pod
● Gathers the result of Flannel
CNI plugin
● Creates BPF programs which
are attached to veth devices