Happy 10th Birthday, Cilium! When the first commit was made, we were moving from static, long-lived systems to dynamic, ephemeral ones that are constantly changing under load. Instead of trying to hide that complexity behind another abstraction, Cilium moved it closer to where it actually happens in the kernel with eBPF.
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 December 2025
Happy 10th Birthday, Cilium! When the first commit was made, we were moving from static, long-lived systems to dynamic, ephemeral ones that are constantly changing under load. Instead of trying to hide that complexity behind another abstraction, Cilium moved it closer to where it actually happens in the kernel with eBPF.
That shift is still strongly underway. I was reminded of it this past week at Linux Plumbers Conference, where talk after talk showed the kernel becoming a place for innovation again from rewriting VM networking for the cloud native world to Meta replacing SELinux with eBPF. Rather than being something you avoid touching, the kernel is increasingly where new ideas land first. Here's to another decade of Cilium and eBPF!
After LPC, I'm off in Hokkaido this week for skiing and surfing so let’s 🐝 -gin.
Upcoming on Dec 19: eCHO Episode 199: eBPF Summit Hackathon Edition
Upcoming on Jan 9: eCHO Episode 200: Celebrating a Decade of Cilium
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