Cilium is now considered the de facto cloud native networking platform for Kubernetes, connecting, securing, and monitoring millions of applications across thousands of clusters. With such versatility and feature-richness, Cilium can be daunting to learn. This comprehensive guide breaks Cilium down, making it broadly accessible to the increasing number of users who’ll encounter the platform in their careers.

Authors Nico Vibert, Filip Nikolic, and James Laverack, all from Isovalent (creators of eBPF and Cilium), take you through how Cilium works, the problems it can solve, and how to run it in production. If you’re an experienced platform engineer or network architect who wants to get on top of the next big thing in cloud networking, this book is for you.

• Learn about Kubernetes networking and the role of Cilium

• Dive into the various use cases Cilium addresses

• Understand Cilium’s architecture and how it moves packets around

• Secure workloads through the use of network policies

• Connect multiple clusters for service load balancing and discovery

• Observe application networking performance for troubleshooting and forensics

• Leverage Cilium’s built-in service mesh and networking capabilities for complex traffic engineering

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Why Cilium?

Chapter 2. Inside Cilium

Chapter 3. Getting Started with Cilium

Chapter 4. IP Address Management

Chapter 5. The Cilium Datapath

Chapter 6. Service Networking

Chapter 7. Ingress and Gateway API

Chapter 8. Performance Networking and Traffic Optimization

Chapter 9. Multicluster Networking

Chapter 10. Cluster Access

Chapter 11. Cluster Egress

Chapter 12. Network Policy

Chapter 13. Layer 7 and FQDN Policy

Chapter 14. Transparent Encryption

Chapter 15. Observability with Hubble

Chapter 16. Operations

Praise for Cilium: Up and Running

Comprehensive, without being intimidating, this book is a good starting point for beginners and also dives deep into nuances that even experienced readers will find insightful.

—Nimisha Mehta, Senior Software Engineer, Confluent

Cilium: Up and Running guides the reader through common use cases and provides a comprehensive overview of internal components and architecture. Together with code examples and the authors’ comments, this is a good reference for running Cilium in production.

—Tony Norlin, Proact IT Group

Cilium: Up and Running is an essential guide for novices and veterans in the Kubernetes networking space, taking you on a comprehensive journey to building robust and performant Kubernetes networking in production using Cilium’s powerful eBPF capabilities.

—Glen Yu, Principal Consultant at Trident Consulting

The authors’ real feat is how they share their experience to explain what Cilium does and provide you with all the keys to run it in production promptly. Turns any Cilium Padawan into a fully-grown Jedi!

—Quentin Monnet, Principal Dataplane Engineer at Hedgehog

About the Author

Nico Vibert is a senior staff technical marketing engineer at Isovalent, the company behind Cilium. Known for his “education without the jargon” approach, Nico simplifies complex networking topics through books, videos, and hands-on labs that have reached hundreds of thousands of engineers.

Filip Nikolic is a platform engineer at Isovalent, where he contributes to CNCF projects like Cilium, Tetragon, and Argo CD, leveraging his networking expertise to advance cloud native technologies across industries.

James Laverack is a principal customer success architect at Isovalent and a software engineer and conference speaker with over a decade of industry experience. James is also an upstream contributor to multiple CNCF projects as well as a former Kubernetes release lead (v1.24 “Stargazer”).