Cilium 1.12: eBPF Networking Advances and Gateway API Support

Introduction

Cilium 1.12, released on June 15, 2022, continues to push the boundaries of eBPF-powered Kubernetes networking. This release delivers Gateway API support, significant performance improvements, enhanced security capabilities, and expanded observability through Hubble.

If you’re trying to simplify the “networking + policy + visibility” story without bolting together three separate stacks, releases like this are where Cilium tends to move the needle. Gateway API support is also a practical signal: teams can adopt a more modern ingress/egress model while keeping the same eBPF data plane and observability surface.

Gateway API Support

Gateway API implementation provides native support for the Kubernetes Gateway API standard.
HTTPRoute support enables sophisticated routing rules and traffic management.
TLSRoute capabilities enable secure routing with automatic certificate management.
BackendRef improvements provide better service and endpoint selection.

eBPF Performance Enhancements

Direct routing improvements reduce latency and CPU overhead for pod-to-pod communication.
Service mesh acceleration enables high-performance service-to-service communication without sidecar proxies.
Network policy enforcement optimizations reduce per-packet processing overhead, improving throughput.
Connection tracking enhancements improve scalability for high-connection-count workloads.

Security & Policy Improvements

Network policy refinements provide more expressive rules with CIDR, FQDN, and service account matching.
L7 policy enforcement extends beyond HTTP to support gRPC, Kafka, and DNS protocols with deep packet inspection.
Encryption improvements enhance WireGuard integration with automatic key rotation and multi-cluster support.
Identity-based policies leverage Kubernetes service accounts and labels for zero-trust networking.

Hubble Observability Expansion

Service maps visualization provides real-time topology views of service-to-service communication with policy overlay.
Flow logs export to external systems (e.g., Splunk, ELK) for long-term storage and analysis.
Metrics integration with Prometheus exposes detailed network and security metrics for dashboards and alerts.
Tracing support enables correlation of network flows with application traces for end-to-end observability.

Multi-Cluster & Service Mesh

Cluster mesh improvements simplify multi-cluster connectivity with automatic service discovery and failover.
Global services enable transparent access to services across clusters with DNS integration.
Service mesh capabilities provide Istio-compatible APIs for gradual migration from sidecar-based meshes.
Gateway API support enables modern ingress and egress configuration with Cilium’s eBPF data plane.

Getting Started

helm repo add cilium https://helm.cilium.io/
helm install cilium cilium/cilium --version 1.12.0 \
  --namespace kube-system \
  --set hubble.enabled=true \
  --set hubble.relay.enabled=true \
  --set gatewayAPI.enabled=true

Enable Hubble UI:

kubectl port-forward -n kube-system svc/hubble-ui 12000:80

Summary

Aspect	Details
Release Date	June 15, 2022
Headline Features	Gateway API support, eBPF performance improvements, enhanced security, expanded Hubble observability
Why it Matters	Delivers high-performance, secure networking with comprehensive observability and modern API support

Cilium 1.12 demonstrates the power of eBPF for cloud-native networking, providing teams with a unified platform for connectivity, security, and observability.

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