Networking

Cilium Service Mesh

Revolutionizing networking and simplify operations

Performance Meets Simplicity

Traditional service meshes, despite their benefits, can present significant challenges. These include the complexity and error-prone nature of IP and port-based network policies, performance overhead due to their proxy-based architecture, limited granularity in visibility of service-to-service communication, interoperability issues with existing infrastructure, scalability challenges as the number of services and traffic volumes increase, and operational and resource overhead.

Cilium's Next-Generation Service Mesh

Cilium Service Mesh redefines traditional service mesh frameworks by integrating the mesh layer directly into the kernel using eBPF, thus eliminating the need for sidecar proxies. It manages connectivity at both the networking and application protocol layers, handling protocols like IP, TCP, UDP, HTTP, Kafka, gRPC, and DNS with greater efficiency.

Superior Networking with eBPF

At the heart of Cilium is eBPF, a revolutionary technology built into the Linux kernel. With eBPF, Cilium delivers lightning-fast, efficient, and scalable networking. This bypasses the performance drawbacks of traditional proxies, enabling direct and efficient communication between your services.

eBPF powered service mesh illustration

Control Plane Options

Cilium Service Mesh gives users the choice of control plane options for the ideal balance of complexity and richness, from simpler options such as Ingress and Gateway API to richer options with Istio, to the full power of Envoy via the Envoy CRD.

Sidecar-free Option

With Cilium Service Mesh, users now have the choice to run a service mesh with sidecars or without them, based on their specific requirements and constraints. This flexibility reduces the complexity and overhead impact of sidecars.

Want to Learn More?

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Read the Documentation

Cilium has extensive documentation that covers its features and use cases. The docs also features tutorials for common user stories.

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