Software Engineering Daily Cilium, eBPF, and Modern Kubernetes Networking with Bill Mulligan
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Mar 26, 2026 Bill Mulligan, maintainer in the Cilium ecosystem and Isovalent team member, discusses eBPF-powered cloud-native networking. He explains how eBPF runs safe programs in the Linux kernel. He highlights Cilium’s identity-based networking, kube-proxy replacement, Hubble observability, and plans for IPv6, VM support, and migration tooling.
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How eBPF Reprograms The Linux Kernel Safely
- eBPF lets you safely run sandboxed programs inside the Linux kernel to change kernel behavior on the fly.
- Bill Mulligan compares eBPF to JavaScript for browsers and explains its verifier prevents out-of-bounds memory and crashes.
Cilium Replaces iptables With Hashmap Lookups
- Cilium replaces iptables and kube-proxy with eBPF-based lookups to move from linear rule processing to O(1) hashmap lookups.
- That change reduces CPU and latency at scale, improving throughput for clusters with thousands of endpoints.
Identity Based Networking Solves Ephemeral IPs
- Cilium shifts Kubernetes networking from IP-based to identity-based policies using labels instead of ephemeral IPs.
- This identity model reduces churn as containers come and go because policies reference service identity, not changing addresses.
