Cilium 1.14: Advanced eBPF Networking and Gateway API Excellence

Introduction

Cilium 1.14, released on April 20, 2023, is most relevant if you expose services on Kubernetes and need stable, debuggable traffic paths. The practical wins usually show up at the edge: clearer traffic behavior, fewer surprises during failover, and easier debugging when routes go weird.

Advanced eBPF Features

• eBPF program optimizations reduce CPU overhead and improve packet processing performance.
• Custom eBPF programs enable advanced networking and security use cases.
• Network policy enforcement improvements provide faster rule matching with reduced latency.
• Load balancing enhancements deliver better distribution algorithms with lower overhead.

Gateway API Excellence

1. Gateway API v1beta1 support provides production-ready implementation of the Kubernetes Gateway API standard.
2. HTTPRoute capabilities enable sophisticated routing rules with header matching, path rewriting, and traffic splitting.
3. TLSRoute support enables secure routing with automatic certificate management and SNI handling.
4. BackendRef improvements provide better service selection and health checking.

Enhanced Observability

• Hubble improvements provide deeper insights into network flows and policy enforcement.
• Service maps visualization shows real-time topology with policy overlay and metrics.
• Flow logs export to external systems enables long-term storage and compliance.
• Metrics expansion exposes detailed network, security, and policy metrics for Prometheus.

Security & Policy Enhancements

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

Performance & Scalability

• Direct routing improvements reduce latency for pod-to-pod communication.
• Service mesh acceleration enables high-performance communication without sidecars.
• Connection tracking enhancements improve scalability for high-connection workloads.
• Memory efficiency optimizations reduce resource footprint in large clusters.

Getting Started

helm repo add cilium https://helm.cilium.io/
helm install cilium cilium/cilium --version 1.14.0 \
  --namespace kube-system \
  --set hubble.enabled=true \
  --set hubble.relay.enabled=true \
  --set gatewayAPI.enabled=true \
  --set hubble.ui.enabled=true

Create a Gateway:

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: my-gateway
spec:
  gatewayClassName: cilium
  listeners:
  - name: web
    protocol: HTTP
    port: 80

Summary

Cilium 1.14 demonstrates the power of eBPF for cloud-native networking, providing teams with advanced capabilities for connectivity, security, and observability.