Cisco Systems Inc. is acquiring Isovalent Inc., a startup that develops networking software based on the open-source eBPF tool.

Cisco announced the deal today without disclosing the financial terms. The acquisition comes about two years after the networking giant backed a $29 million funding round for Isovalent alongside Google LLC and Andreessen Horowitz.

A server’s operating system is involved in practically all the actions that the applications running on top perform. As a result, it has extensive visibility into those workloads’ activity, which is useful for monitoring purposes. Developers can harness an operating system such as Linux to detect application performance issues, cybersecurity risks and other technical problems.

Using Linux for workload monitoring was historically a highly complicated and error-prone process. To address the challenge, a group of developers released an open-source tool called eBPF in 2014. The tool significantly reduced the amount of effort required to turn Linux into a monitoring tool, which helped make the practice fairly widespread in public cloud environments.

Isovalent is a major contributor to eBPF. It’s also the developer of two other open-source projects, Cilium and Tetragon, that extend the tool’s feature set with additional capabilities.

Cilium helps organizations manage the flow of network traffic among their software containers. It includes an automated latency reduction mechanism, tools for tracking connection speeds and a load balancer that ensures traffic is evenly spread out among containers. There are also cybersecurity features that ease tasks such as encrypting network traffic. 

Tetragon, Isovalent’s other open-source project, complements Cilium by providing additional cybersecurity capabilities. It can monitor a container environment for malicious activity such as attempts to weaken a server’s cybersecurity settings. Additionally, Tetragon blocks unnecessary connections between containers that could be used by hackers to steal data or spread malware.

Cisco will use Isovalent’s open-source technology to extend its cybersecurity portfolio. Another focus of the acquisition is Cilium Mesh, a commercial tool built by Isovalent to help enterprises connect applications running in cloud, on-premises and at the edge with one another. Cisco hinted that it plans to combine Cilium Mesh with its software-defined networking products.

“Imagine in today’s distributed environment – of applications, virtual machines, containers and cloud assets – having security controls with total visibility, without hindering networking and application performance,” said Jeetu Patel, the executive vice president and general manager of Cisco’s security and collaboration group. “The combination of Cisco and Isovalent will make this a reality.”

The networking giant has committed to “nurturing, investing in, and contributing to” eBPF, Cilium and Tetragon. Cisco will establish an independent advisory board to oversee its contributions to the projects.

Other major players in the enterprise technology market have also made eBPF-focused deals over the past few years. In 2020, New Relic and Splunk Inc., which is currently being acquired by Cisco, both bought startups that had built products based on the Linux monitoring technology. Elastic NV made a similar acquisition the following year. 

Photo: Cisco