Cilium

Cilium is an open-source, cloud-native networking, security, and observability solution. It provides a modern approach to securing and connecting container workloads by leveraging eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) technology. This enables deep visibility and control over network traffic and application behavior at the Linux kernel level, providing significant performance benefits and enabling advanced security policies based on application identities rather than network addresses. Cilium offers several key benefits, including network policy enforcement, service mesh functionality, load balancing, observability, and security for microservices architectures. Its main use cases involve securing Kubernetes clusters, providing fine-grained network policies based on application identities, implementing service mesh features without sidecars in some cases, and enabling advanced observability for debugging and troubleshooting distributed applications.