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

1st November 2022

In case you missed it, last week was KubeCon and it was abuzz with eBPF and Cilium. Some of the highlights were:

• Microsoft AKS picking Cilium for their CNI data plane making Cilium the default CNI for all major cloud providers
• Announced the integration of Grafana and Cilium making big waves as Grafana is seen as a crucial part of the observability future
• CNCF Graduation application of Cilium live on stage. (If you haven’t yet, make sure to 👍 the pull request)
• Hosted or participated in 14 KubeCon sessions across KubeCon, eBPF Day, ServiceMeshCon, Observability Con, SecurityCon, and Kubernetes on Edge Day

Looking back on the show, I think we were see this KubeCon as the kick-off of the ecosystem around Cilium. With the Microsoft announcement, Cilium has cemented its status as the standard way of doing networking in cloud native environments.

Once an ecosystem has a standard, it makes it massively easier to provide integrations and extensions since everyone is using the same thing. We can already see this with the Grafana announcement too. With Cilium everywhere capturing observability data with eBPF, it makes total sense to connect it to Grafana and visualize the data. 

Cilium everywhere will also bring the power and functionality of eBPF everywhere. The ecosystem around Cilium can leverage this data and functionality to build better platforms to end users. And this is just the kick-off. Let's 🐝 gin!

The Technical

Configure Azure CNI Powered by Cilium in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Cilium is now the standard CNI across all three major cloud providers, not much else I really have to say

Early release of the in-depth O’Reilly book on eBPF

If you like Liz Rice's "What is eBPF?" report this is the book for you diving into all of the details

Writing an eBPF/XDP load-balancer in Rust

XDP, Rust, and a walks on walk through, what more could you ask for 🔥

Resiliency Superpowers with eBPF

Liz Rice at InfoQ Con helping us understand eBPF from dynamic vulnerability patching through super-fast load balancing to multi-cluster networking

Towards debuggability and secure deployments of eBPF programs on Windows

Native image generation allows support for more systems, verification and signing of eBPF programs, and source-level debugging. Cool stuff!

DIY CPU profiler: from BPF maps to pprof

The name says it all, the blog has the code

Automated Distributed Tracing Using eBPF (Part 1)

Learn how to do metadata-based correlation to automate distributed tracing context propagation with eBPF

OWASP Bristol - What is eBPF and why should you care?

Dive into eBPF for security use cases

The Hacker’s New Power Tool – eBPF

Click bait title, but a decent introduction to the topic. "sees the positive side of this technology, but also for its potential for use by malicious actors"

aiven/pgtracer

"Tracing tools for PostgreSQL, using eBPF"

groundcover-com/murre

"Murre is an on-demand, scaleable source of container resource metrics for K8s" along with the launch blog post

🐝

The Ecosystem

Cilium CNCF Graduation Application

Check out this blog to see how we applied live on stage at KubeCon

Announcing Azure CNI Powered by Cilium

Cilium is the default CNI for all major cloud providers. That is point you really have to ask yourself why you would choose anything else 🤷

Microsoft has an announcement, blog, and docs too

Grafana and Cilium: Deep eBPF-powered observability for Kubernetes and cloud native infrastructure

The best way to collect observability data combined with the best way to visualize it. Cilium ❤️ Grafana

Taming troubleshooting at the cloud-native ‘connectivity layer’

Hot take 🔥 I think we are going to be talking a lot about connectivity in the future, maybe even more than observability

Grafana Labs Allies With Isovalent to Improve Cloud-Native Observability

"networking is about to play a more pivotal role that goes well beyond the need for simple connectivity" where is the like button on this newsletter?

Next-Generation Observability with eBPF

"eBPF is not the end goal, but the tool and method which enables users to reach the end goal of deep, intrinsic data access to create low-overhead observability for diverse application environments" Love it 😍

Sprinkling eBPF Onto Your Observability

"One point I want people to walk away with is that there are incredibly exciting opportunities with eBPF. Some use cases using eBPF are already very viable to be used today"

🐝

The How To

Topology Aware Routing and Service Mesh across Clusters with Cluster Mesh

Learn how Cluster Mesh enables topology aware routing, service mesh, and identity aware security

Initial impressions of the Cilium Grafana Observability Demo

"the initial impression is that it is neat to be able to see the trace data integrated like this" learn how to set it up too

Strengthen your system with Tetragon's eBPF-based Security Observability and Runtime Enforcement capabilities

Awesome to see the first external post out in the wild! And it's also in German

Cilium with Ingress, OpenTelemetry and L7 policies

Learn how to set up Cilium with Ingress, cert-manager, Jaeger, L7 Rules, Hubble, Tetragon, and Grafana

Using eBPF for High-Performance Networking in Cilium

Watch this video from Liz Rice to understand how networking with Cilium works

Aya: Extending the Linux Kernel with eBPF and Rust by Michal Rostecki

Recording from the Rust and Tell Berlin meetup

🐝

The Events

Isovalent & Grafana: A match made in Hive-an!

Learn about the new Grafana and Cilium integration on November 15th

Bee Tracks: Service Mesh and Tetragon

Hands on introduction to service mesh and Tetragon on November 16th

🐝

The Videos

eCHO Episode 65:

bpfd

eCHO Episode 66:

Cilium at KubeCon NA 2022