With the FOSDEM eBPF Dev Room and CiliumCon schedules out now, my travel is set for the spring. If you see me at either conference, I'm always happy to chat about how you can get involved or where these projects are headed next. And speaking of "next", it’s January, which means I'm legally required to make some predictions in the newsletter.
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
13th January 2026
With the FOSDEM eBPF Dev Room and CiliumCon schedules out now, my travel is set for the spring. If you see me at either conference, I'm always happy to chat about how you can get involved or where these projects are headed next. And speaking of "next", it’s January, which means I'm legally required to make some predictions in the newsletter.
2026 is is the year we get smarter about eBPF. For the last few years, just having eBPF was the differentiator. But we all know that in reality eBPF is a firehose. The raw data throughput can be immense, and simply piping that firehose isn't a solution. The winners in 2026 will be the projects and vendors that can tame that firehose into a clear, efficient signal.
I'm already seeing this happen in Tetragon with the switch from a stream of events into the ringbufer to a Connection Log Pull Model that aggregates data transfer to user space. This change cut Tetragon's already low CPU usage another 97%! That is the difference between "using eBPF" and "optimizing eBPF" and 2026 will differentiate on the latter. I have to optimize my travel booking battle with Concur so let’s 🐝 -gin.
Upcoming on Jan 23: eCHO Episode 201: 2026 networking, security, and eBPF predictions
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
