eCHO news in your bi-weekly wrap up of all things eBPF and Cilium. If you want to keep up on the latest in cloud native networking, observability, and security this is your quelle

Of physics and FUD. While it seems the technical folks are on summer break (see the almost empty tech section below) the marketing people bringing their FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) are certainly not. To steal my favorite quote this week, "We can't change physics, but we can change the way we do things." eBPF and Cilium are not changing physics, but they do represent a step change in the way things can be done by allowing us to safely execute code in the kernel.

With any new technological change, there are challenges to overcome and edge cases to find, but that can also quickly turn to spreading FUD about the technology if you don't like the new wave. I'm confident that we can overcome this as a community by producing great technology and content so new people can get to the bottom of it and the acquisition of Seekret by Datadog only makes me more excited for the space. If you have something you would like to share with the community on ebpf.io or cilium.io, please don't hesitate to reach out to me so we can help spread the word. You might even see it here too - Let's 🐝 gin!

The Technical

Peeking into the BPF verifier

Great slide deck (almost 200 slides 🤯) diving into the code of the verifier and how it works

Key metrics for monitoring Cilium

If you are running at scale and are having connectivity issues, read this post to learn from Datadog's experience

Commandline Cloaking 2 - Tetragon and Nim

"from a programmer’s perspective Tetragon is really cool, easy to run and attach Kprobes to observe all kinds of activity." Also the first Tetragon article in the wild 🥳

Pinpoint Service Mesh Critical Performance Impact by using eBPF

A dive into how Apache Skywalking Rover can help you spot performance impacts

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The Ecosystem

Cilium User Story: Nexxiot

Learn how to manage 200,000+ IoT devices in remote areas of the world while maintaining ISO certification with Cilium

Kubernetes, Networking, and Finding the VMware of Cloud Native

So good it needs two quotes:

"Traditional enterprises are coming into the cloud native world and they have enterprise networking requirements, but their app teams also want a service mesh - And now these two layers are coming together" and "From a strategic infrastructure perspective, just like the virtualization layer was key, now the connectivity and network layer is absolutely key"

Intro to eBPF

I've looked up to Christ Short for a long time and actually based a lot of this newsletter off of his DevOps'ish. Go read his take on eBPF and subscribe

What Is XDP (Express Data Path) in Linux

Nice introduction. I like the simple way it breaks down XDP, but not all the flashing ads 😅

Datadog acquires Seekret

Expect to see more coming 💸

Why sidecar-less Cilium Service Mesh is a game-changer

"Let's not change how physics works, let's just change how we do it" 

Performance Matters for Service Mesh

"Service Mesh is going through a period of growth and innovation, and as we’ve seen many times before, you can’t treat performance as an afterthought when driving the adoption of a new technology"

Traceable AI First API Security Company to Add eBPF to its Security Platform for Deeper API Observability and Visibility

The title says it all with additional coverage from CSO and SiliconANGLE

5G Visibility Using eBPF Technology

Hadn't thought of it before, but is it actually quite useful that eBPF is vendor agnostic, especially in telco settings where they really love their stacks 

Cilium: eBPF powered CNI, a NOS Solution for Modern Clouds

Learn that NOS = Networking, Observability, and Security and many of the great features of Cilium

Redefining service mesh with Cilium

Quick intro into how Cilium service mesh makes the networking path shorter

eBPF — Divulging The Hidden Super Power

"As said in Spiderman movies “Great power comes with great responsibility” when you unlock the God mode of Linux you are on your own" unless you are using Cilium 😉

eBPF and Sidecars - Getting the Most Performance and Resiliency out of the Service Mesh

"Node proxy is actually going to land in Istio soon, but it’ll always be opt-in" Glad to see them finally joining the party too 💃

Cilium, eBPF, and EKS Anywhere - AWS Container Days

Fireside chat with Chris Short, Liz Rice, and Duffie Cooley about eBPF and K8s

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The How To

Monitor Cilium-managed infrastructure with Datadog

Learn how to use Datadog to monitor and remediate common problems in Cilium

Monitor Cilium and Kubernetes performance with Hubble

Quick intro to Hubble showing how to visualize network flows in both the UI and CLI

How to enable the Cilium Hubble UI in a Civo k3s cluster

Quick intro to get started on Civo

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The Events

eBPF Summit

Back for the third year and we are putting together a great program (I know at least two eBPF maintainers will be speaking) CfP is now closes and it will be a very tough choice for us 😅

Cilium and eBPF @ Open Source Summit

A broad variety of talks from a Cilium workshops and talk on service mesh to eBPF for beginners and privilege escalation September 13-16th in Dublin

How the Hive Came to Bee: The history of eBPF

Find out how eBPF started, how it developed, and what challenges can be solved which were impossible before on August 17th

eBPF-based Security Observability & Runtime Enforcement with Cilium Tetragon

Join Raphaël Pinson at Cloud Native Computing Zurich on August 25th 

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The Videos

eCHO Episode 55:

Cilium 1.12 Release

eCHO Episode 56:

Anatomy of an eBPF Program