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

16th June 2026

Everyone loves to talk about compute while "forgetting" that the network even exists. AI datacenters are measured in megawatts and GPU counts, but far less attention gets paid to the hard part of wiring all of it together. OpenAI recently opened up about using Cilium and Isovalent and I think this quote captures the problem that Cilium is solving in the AI world perfectly.

"Cilium allows my team to move quickly working with GPU capacity in an extremely competitive market where bringing forward launches or compute by a day or week can have profound implications on the business. Having a single kube-native networking control plane lets us easily meet compliance or security requirements in a dynamically changing environment where agentic workflows have accelerated the rate of change using the full tooling, programmability and power of the Kubernetes ecosystem."

eBPF is becoming THE solution to AI's challenges, whether networking, security, or profiling, because it is the tool that provides programability and speed exactly where it is needed the most, in the kernel. I'm biking to a festival and need to pack up my new bike so let’s 🐝 -gin.

The Technical

Securing CI/CD for an open source project: Controlling who runs what

How Cilium locks down who can trigger CI builds & what code they execute

When Public Registry Availability Becomes a Kubernetes Availability Problem

A Cilium & EKS case study on reducing image pull risks

Dev Platform: Guardrails, then Trading Flannel for eBPF

Three Helm overrides is all it takes to run Cilium on Talos

Kairos on Hetzner Cloud: Seven Failures, Three Cloud-Configs, One PR

Of course Cilium is chosen for the networking stack

Hidden Latency in Python: Where APM Stops Looking

Clickpost built eBPF trackers that found 11 seconds of latency 

Multi-Cluster, Cross-Regional ECP Database Access with Cilium Cluster Mesh

Connecting regions in Iowa and Virginia with Cilium ClusterMesh

Two Copies Beat One: Designing bpf_sock_splice_pair() for Fast TCP Loopback

A second copy made TCP loopback 7x faster

skroutz/ebpf-tracker

A GitHub Action using eBPF to log every connection a workflow runner

losfair/zeroserve

Zero-config, fast `io_uring`-based HTTPS server. Config with eBPF

Kookiejarz/Auto_XDP

Auto-sync listening ports into XDP/nftables, preserve return traffic, keep host protection alive with fallback

false-systems/tapio

eBPF observer for K8s that filters anomalies at the edge before they leave the host

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The Ecosystem

OpenAI Uses Isovalent for a Common Networking Foundation for AI Infrastructure

OpenAI uses Cilium as its default Kubernetes CNI across cloud and bare metal

Research Update: Isolated Execution Environment for eBPF (Part 3)

Sandboxing eBPF programs from kernel objects without relying on the verifier

From Silos to Service Topology: Why Netflix Built a Real-Time Service Map

Netflix uses eBPF network flows as the base layer of its real-time service map

Driving eBPF Performance and Stability: Updates from the LSFMMBPF eBPF Track

Updates on the addition of KASAN memory checker support for eBPF programs

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The How To

The Video

CertSight - Real-time certificate observability - Installation & Operation

Real-time certificate observability powered by Tetragon

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The Events

ACM SOSP'26 Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions

September 29th in Prague, CfP open through June 19

Linux Plumbers Conference

October 5-7th in Prague, CfP open though July 24

CiliumCon

November 9 in Salt Lake City, CfP open though June 21

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The Livestreams

eCHO Episode 209: Cilium on VKS with the Broadcom VKS team

eCHO Episode 210: Exploring Multi-Pool IPAM with Cilium 1.19

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 and Katie Meinders. Any feedback is welcome!