Solo.io Delivers on Cilium Support Promise for Gloo Networks

Solo.io today made generally available an instance of its Gloo Network for managing networking in Kubernetes environments that now supports virtual networks based on the open source Cilium virtual networking software.

Cilium employs extended Berkeley Packet Filtering (eBPF) in the Linux kernel to enable connectivity at Layer 3 to Layer 4 of the networking stack. In addition, it provides capabilities to enforce policies, integrate multiple Kubernetes clusters across a single mesh, eliminate the need for kube-proxy, encrypt traffic, manage bandwidth and unify the management of ingress and egress via gateway.

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Gloo Network adds additional networking, security and observability capabilities to streamline the management of Cilium at scale. Solo.io is also providing integrations with Hubble, a Cilium sub-project that provides network observability, metrics and a service map.

Keith Babo, a product manager for Solo.io, said that as Cilium continues to gain traction in Kubernetes environments, Solo.io will add support alongside other alternatives for virtual networking. In fact, Cilium is now part of the de facto standard stack of software that also includes the Ambient edition of Istio service mesh provided by Solo.io, Kubernetes, Envoy and the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) and the SPIFFE runtime environment (SPIRE), he noted.

Collectively known as the CAKES stack, the goal is to provide a framework for integrating networking services at a time when fleets of Kubernetes clusters are now being regularly deployed in production environments, added Babo.

The pace at which Cilium is adopted is, of course, tied to the rate at which organizations are adopting instances of Linux that support eBPF. In effect, eBPF changes the way operating systems are designed. It bridges the boundary between kernel and user space by enabling developers to combine and apply logic across multiple subsystems that were historically completely independent. That approach enables, for example, networking or security software to scale at much higher levels of throughput.

It’s not clear to what degree eBPF might one day drive convergence across distinct categories once multiple tools and applications run at the microkernel level, but Cilium has emerged as one of the earliest examples of how networking services will be delivered using eBPF. Originally developed by Isovalent, Cilium is now being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), while a sister eBPF Consortium focuses on fostering broader adoption of an approach to securely running software within the Linux microkernel. Late last year, Cisco announced it is acquiring Isovalent to further spur adoption of eBPF to run networking and security software.

It remains to be seen how IT organizations themselves might be realigned as software running at the eBPF level becomes more commonplace, but arguably, Kubernetes environments will be at the forefront of those efforts for no other reason than there is much less dependency on legacy tools to manage those functions. The one thing that is certain, however, is there will soon be much higher levels of collaboration across networking, security, storage and observability as silos that separate distinct classes of tools become better integrated at the eBPF level.