The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which hosts many popular open-source projects such as Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry, has announced the graduation of another project: Cilium. Reaching graduated status indicates that a project is stable and has been successfully used in production environments.
Cilium is a networking, security, and observability tool that is built on the eBPF technology. It offers Layer 3-4 connectivity between container workloads, an integrated ingress and egress gateway, the ability to mesh multiple Kubernetes clusters, the ability to mesh external workloads into Kubernetes, and more.
“eBPF has grown into a powerful technology for extending the Linux kernel,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. “Cilium and the modern eBPF stack will help shape the future of cloud native networking, observability, and security because of eBPF’s visibility into the kernel and ability to oversee and control the entire system. Cilium has demonstrated really impressive growth in its nearly two years in the Incubator, and we’re excited to watch as the ecosystem continues to push the benefits of eBPF even further.”
The project was born at Isovalent and joined the CNCF in October 2021 as an incubating project. It has since gained over 800 individual maintainers and is the second most active project by commits behind Kubernetes. It is used at companies like Bloomberg, S&P Global, and The New York Times.
“With the rise of distributed computing and microservices, networking has become the key layer tying everything together,” said Dan Wendlandt, CEO of Isovalent. “Isovalent is proud of our role in the creation and development of Cilium as a solution for networking, observability, and security in the cloud native world. Cilium’s graduation highlights its leading position as a critical component of the modern computing stack and reinforces our belief that eBPF is a key technology enabling future innovation.”
