Five years ago, when Google chose Cilium as the networking data plane for GKE, it was a massive milestone for the community. Google lays out all of the features that Cilium enabled in their 10 year networking review, but it can be simply summed up as Cilium "represented a significant leap in GKE's CNI capabilities." Since then Cilium has become the standard for Kubernetes networking and security.
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
7th October 2025
Five years ago, when Google chose Cilium as the networking data plane for GKE, it was a massive milestone for the community. Google lays out all of the features that Cilium enabled in their 10 year networking review, but it can be simply summed up as Cilium "represented a significant leap in GKE's CNI capabilities." Since then Cilium has become the standard for Kubernetes networking and security.
Don't believe me? Just look at the adopters page. And more recently, driven by customer demand, OVH chose Cilium as the default for their managed Kubernetes service and Isovalent's Cilium distribution became the first and only CNI certified across the entire Red Hat ecosystem (Network Conformance, OpenShift Virtualization, OpenShift Service Mesh, and OpenShift Hosted Control Planes). Cloud native has gone from “how do we get pods talking?” to “how do we orchestrate distributed AI pipelines across thousands of GPUs with microsecond latency?” No matter where enterprises need Kubernetes, Cilium is the default networking layer that they can rely upon.
I need to go ask more people to fill out the Cilium User Survey so let’s 🐝 -gin.
"Cilium allowed Cloudera to scale beyond 10,000 workloads without encountering IP exhaustion issues, all while offering clear visibility into pod-level networking"
eCHO Episode 195: Clang-free: runtime config for Cilium & eBPF
Upcoming (Oct. 17) - eCHO Episode 196: Exploring Tetragon on Linux Servers
The Post of the Week
As always, if you’ve seen a blog post, a tool, or anything else eBPF or Cilium related that you think the rest of the community should hear about, send them my way. You can either hit reply or join the #echo-news channel on Cilium Slack. You can also find all of the past episodes on the website.
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Written and sent by Bill Mulligan. Any feedback is welcome!
I work for Isovalent at Cisco which is leading the eBPF-Powered Revolution in Cloud Native Networking, Observability, and Security with Cilium and Tetragon
Cisco/Isovalent, LLC, 755 Sycamore Drive, Milipitas, CA 95035, United States
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