Cilium 1.15: Advanced eBPF Networking and Gateway API Excellence

Introduction

Cilium 1.15, released on May 15, 2024, continues to push the boundaries of eBPF-powered Kubernetes networking. This release delivers comprehensive Gateway API v1 support, advanced eBPF features, enhanced observability, and significant performance improvements for large-scale deployments.

Gateway API v1 Production Support

• Full Gateway API v1 implementation provides production-ready support for the Kubernetes Gateway API standard.
• HTTPRoute v1 capabilities enable sophisticated routing with advanced matching, filtering, and traffic splitting.
• TLSRoute v1 support enables secure routing with automatic certificate management and SNI handling.
• GRPCRoute integration provides native support for gRPC traffic routing and load balancing.

Advanced eBPF Features

1. Custom eBPF programs enable advanced networking and security use cases beyond standard policies.
2. Network policy enforcement improvements provide faster rule matching with reduced latency.
3. Load balancing enhancements deliver better distribution algorithms with lower overhead.
4. Connection tracking optimizations improve scalability for high-connection workloads.

Enhanced Observability

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

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 and better performance.
• 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.
• Memory efficiency optimizations reduce resource footprint in large clusters.
• CPU optimization reduces overhead for network policy evaluation and packet processing.

Getting Started

helm repo add cilium https://helm.cilium.io/
helm install cilium cilium/cilium --version 1.15.0 \
  --namespace kube-system \
  --set hubble.enabled=true \
  --set hubble.relay.enabled=true \
  --set gatewayAPI.enabled=true \
  --set hubble.ui.enabled=true

Create a Gateway with HTTPRoute:

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: my-gateway
spec:
  gatewayClassName: cilium
  listeners:
  - name: web
    protocol: HTTP
    port: 80
---
apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: my-route
spec:
  parentRefs:
  - name: my-gateway
  rules:
  - matches:
    - path:
        type: PathPrefix
        value: /api
    backendRefs:
    - name: my-service
      port: 80

Summary

Cilium 1.15 demonstrates the power of eBPF for cloud-native networking, providing teams with advanced capabilities for connectivity, security, and observability at scale.