eCHO news is 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

30th May 2023

bpfconf recently wrapped up and if you weren't invited, (like me :D) you can still catch up on all the slides. I like Alexei's talk "What should be the anthem of BPF?" where the trough of disillusionment on the Gartner hype cycle "getting burned by the eBPF verifier". He makes the case that the biggest challenge for eBPF is ease of use. People want things that just work™.

While eBPF is far from perfect, I think we are making massive strides in this direction and this week's newsletter provides great examples. There is a project to provide a UI to eBPF programs, another leveraging eBPF to sandbox a web runtime, and one to bring Cilium's eBPF power beyond the Kubernetes ecosystem it began in. All of these point towards a future where eBPF is not only ubiquitous across many ecosystems, but also so easy to use that people will be surprised if it isn't there. Great things are coming so let's 🐝 gin!

The Technical

Unit Testing eBPF Programs

"Beyond the content, kudos to the author for crisply and clearly laying out the intent of the article and prerequisites, referring to prior art for larger questions. Really enjoy the style." - Nicest review ever from HackerNews

Cage4Deno: A Fine-Grained Sandbox for Deno Subprocesses

Research paper that uses eBPF to improve sandboxing of a runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript. "We identified BPF as the ideal candidate to implement the
support to deny rules" code on Github too

ebpfdev/explorer

"eBPF explorer lets you see all the maps and programs in eBPF subsystem"

therealak12/alb

"Yet another Load Balancer using BPF" the next form of YAML

shun159/play-sched-ext

"a short memo about writing custom eBPF scheduler applications"

🐝

The Ecosystem

bpfconf 2023

All the slides and group pictures are up now. Find out where Alexei thinks we are on the hype cycle

Cilium Mesh: A new way to extend Kubernetes benefits across on-premises and cloud networking

"All this cloud-native goodness must translate back into the legacy-infrastructure “badness” that enterprises have been running for years. This is what Cilium Mesh does"

Learning eBPF for Better Observability

Great summary of resource, projects, and code snippets to get started on your eBPF learning journey

Cosmonic Builds the Ideal Container Toolset For Wasm at the Edge; Open Sources Netreap

"Netreap bridges the gap between Nomad and what we consider to be the best CNI out there: Cilium"

Better policies, less tool sprawl: Tietoevry uses Cilium and Hubble

"Using Cilium on the legacy app saved us most likely a whole year" and "Cilium can be crucial for platform maintainers"

eBPF for Cybersecurity - Part 4

A quick intro to Linux Security Module and how ebpfguard is leveraging them

Mastering Kubernetes Networking with Cilium

A quick intro and how to get Cilium up and running on Civo Cloud

An inside look at the new Intro to Cilium course with course creator, Jef Spaleta!

Learn why Jef created the intro to Cilium course and get inspired to sign up

🐝

The How To

Introduction to Cilium (LFS146x)

Linux Foundation's intro course is now live, go enrol!

Building an XDP eBPF Program with C and Golang: A Step-by-Step Guide

Learn how to drop 50% of your traffic for fun and for profit

Using Cilium for Kubernetes networking and observability

Learn to install Cilium and Hubble

Cilium Installation Tips

"Using Helm Chart and IPAM Configuration, LoadBalancer Mode, and Tunnel Mode"

Tutorial: Deploying Isovalent Enterprise for Cilium from Azure Marketplace

Learn how to spend money and get advanced networking, security, and observability capabilities

🐝

The Events

What's new in Cilium 1.13 and beyond!

Join the webinar on May 30th

Cilium Workshop with Isovalent and SuperOrbital - San Francisco

In person on May 30th

Cilium Workshop with Isovalent, Container Solutions & AWS - London

In person on May 31st

Cloud Native Networking & Security

In person meetup on May 31st in Zurich

Cilium Workshop (On-Site Basel)

In person on June 7th

KCD Zurich

Come see me talk about eBPF on June 15th

San Francisco Cilium and eBPF Roundtable with Isovalent

In person on June 15th

🐝

The Videos

eCHO Episode 91:

L2 load balancer

eCHO Episode 92:

Cilium External Workloads