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

11th August 2026

Cilium 1.20 landed this week, and it's a big release. It brought updates to Gateway API, which is now a full traffic management layer, opened the eBPF datapath to third-party plugins so cloud providers can extend it without maintaining a fork, and added native support for upstream APIs like ClusterNetworkPolicy and MCS-API.

Elsewhere in this issue, an eBPF Foundation case study with Google shows how the company cut its diagnostic deployment time from months to hours using eBPF, and a KubeCon Japan talk from Airbnb showed off a traffic generator that skips DPDK entirely. This is also my first issue writing solo, and I have one ask for you: if haven't taken the State of Kubernetes Networking 2026 survey yet, we'd love to get your feedback. You can win prizes, and more responses will give us a truer picture of how people actually run things. 

I'm catching up after a week in Ireland with my extended family, so let’s 🐝 -gin.

The Technical

Cilium 1.20: Gateway API ExternalAuth, TCPRoute/UDPRoute, ENI IPAM for IPv6

Featuring improvements across networking, Gateway API, security, operations & observability.

Inside the eBPF Verifier: Why Your Program Is Constrained, and How It Stays Safe

Debunking a common verifier NULL-check myth

Tracing a Request from External to the POD using VXLAN Cilium

Follow one HTTP request across nodes, through every NAT and VXLAN rewrite

Building a Crash-Safe eBPF Dataplane Loader in Rust

Treat the kernel as the source of truth so crashes and cleanup work the same way

takehaya/xdperf

Generates XDP traffic using WASM plugins for packet templates, skipping DPDK entirely (slides from KubeCon Japan talk)

SoulKyu/cpg

Added a read-only MCP server for agents to query cluster health and dropped flows 

peng-gao-lab/emicro

Real-time multi-hop access control for microservices with eBPF

🐝

The Ecosystem

How Google Leverages eBPF for Real-Time Lock Contention Analysis and Low-Overhead Fleet Diagnostics

eBPF lowered diagnostic deployment at Google from months to hours 

Community & Advocacy Fellowship Program

Applications close September 11

🐝

The How To

The Video

The Road To Cilium: Migrating 150+ Kubernetes Clusters at Airbnb 

From KubeCon Japan, lessons from replacing AWS VPC CNI with Cilium at scale

🐝

The Events

SIGCOMM 2026

August 17-21 in Denver, CO

ACM SOSP'26 Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions

September 29th in Prague

Linux Plumbers Conference

October 5-7th in Prague, schedule for eBPF Track now live

CiliumCon

November 9 in Salt Lake City

🐝 

The Livestreams

eCHO Episode 213: What's New in Cilium 1.20

eCHO Episode 214: Contributing to Cilium with Hadrien Patte of Datadog

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.

🐝

To make sure you keep getting these emails, please add kaoconno@cisco.com to your address book or otherwise mark me as a permitted sender.

Know a friend that needs to be in the know? Forward this to them

Was this forwarded to you? Sign up today!

Written and sent by Katie Meinders. Any feedback is welcome!