What is Cilium?

Cilium is an open source project to provide networking, security, and observability for cloud native environments such as Kubernetes clusters and other container orchestration platforms.

At the foundation of Cilium is a new Linux kernel technology called eBPF, which enables the dynamic insertion of powerful security, visibility, and networking control logic into the Linux kernel. eBPF is used to provide high-performance networking, multi-cluster and multi-cloud capabilities, advanced load balancing, transparent encryption, extensive network security capabilities, transparent observability, and much more.

Networking

Observability

Security

Architecture

Cilium consists of an agent running on all cluster nodes and servers in your environment. It provides networking, security, and observability to the workloads running on that node. Workloads can be containerized or running natively on the system.

Get Hands-On With Cilium

Weekly Interactive Cilium
Introduction and Live Q&A
With Thomas Graf, Cilium Co-Creator
Documentation & Tutorials
Quickly get started with Cilium. Read the documentation or use our interactive tutorial in a live environment.
Documentation Tutorials

We are proud to be a CNCF incubation level project

Learn about Cilium & eBPF

10min Introduction to Cilium

Liz Rice and Thomas Graf answer the most popular questions about the Cilium, its creation and the problems it solves

Watch video

The Future of eBPF based Networking and Security

eBPF Summit 2020, Thomas Graf, Cilium Co-Creator, CTO & Co-Founder Isovalent

Watch video Read blog

Understanding Cilium Network Performance

Explore the performance characteristics of Cilium based on extensive benchmarks

Read blog

Related Projects

Hubble

Hubble is a fully distributed networking and security observability platform for cloud native workloads. Hubble is open source software and built on top of Cilium and eBPF to enable deep visibility into the communication and behavior of services as well as the networking infrastructure in a completely transparent manner.

Learn more

Network Policy Editor

Over the years, we have learned a lot about the common challenges while working with many of you in the Cilium community implementing Kubernetes Network Policy. Networkpolicy.io is a free tool to assist you in your journey to assist you with Kubernetes NetworkPolicy.

Learn more

eBPF Library for Go

eBPF is a pure Go library that provides utilities for loading, compiling, and debugging eBPF programs. It has minimal external dependencies and is intended to be used in long running processes.

Learn more