Open-sourced platform Cilium was created by Isovalent Inc. to help address the rising security and networking challenges emerging as cloud-native environments, including Kubernetes, grow in scale and complexity.

Recently, Isovalent introduced Cilium Service Mesh, which goes even further by enabling users to now connect workloads and systems across multiple clouds and on-premise locations.

“This week we’ve been talking about Cilium Mesh, which is the ability to also connect not just multiple clusters, but also connect to external workloads,”  said Liz Rice (pictured), open source officer of Isovalent. “If you have hybrid cloud, legacy workloads or things running in virtual machines, you’re now able to seamlessly connect those into your set of services that are distributed over Kubernetes or not Kubernetes, or with Cilium Mesh.”

Rice spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Savannah Peterson and Joep Piscaer at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the enhanced Berkeley Packet Filter, how observability might evolve in the near future and CiliumCon. (* Disclosure below.)

Simplifying observability

Cilium is based on eBPF, an observability tool that allows users to execute code in Linux kernels without altering the source code. Isovalent uses this technology to simplify the networking path between workloads and achieve efficient load balancing.

“We also use eBPF for that observability angle, because it’s critical that you can see where your network packets are flowing,” Rise said. “You can see how your services are connected. We’ve also been doing some great work with Grafana. There’s a new Hubble, which is the observability component of Cilium.”

As an open-source project, Cilium has several hundred contributors to the project, with people providing both code and documentation. Isovalent is also assisting people who want to contribute to the project but don’t know how to code.

“Maybe they’re going and doing talks, presentations or creating videos, and we have ways to acknowledge them now in the Cilium project officially so these contributors can feel valued,” Rice said. “We want people to feel that whatever it is they’re adding to the project is valued.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event:

(* Disclosure: Isovalent Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Isovalent nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE