This is a deep dive into ClusterMesh, Cilium's multi-cluster implementation. In a nutshell, ClusterMesh provides:

• Pod IP routing across multiple Kubernetes clusters at native performance via tunneling or direct-routing without requiring any gateways or proxies.

• Transparent service discovery with standard Kubernetes services and coredns/kube-dns.

• Network policy enforcement spanning multiple clusters. Policies can be specified as Kubernetes NetworkPolicy resource or the extended CiliumNetworkPolicy CRD.

• Transparent encryption for all communication between nodes in the local cluster as well as across cluster boundaries.

We are excited to announce the Cilium 1.4 release. The release introduces several new features as well as optimization and scalability work. The highlights include the addition of global services to provide Kubernetes service routing across multiple clusters, DNS request/response aware authorization and visibility, transparent encryption (beta), IPVLAN support for better performance and latency (beta), integration with Flannel, GKE on COS support, AWS metadata based policy enforcement (alpha) as well as significant efforts into optimizing memory and CPU usage.

As we all enjoy a wonderful week at KubeCon 2018 US, we want to provide a preview into the upcoming Cilium 1.4 release. We are days away from 1.4.0-rc1 which will allow for community testing of a lot new exciting functionality. Some of the highlights:

• Multi-Cluster service routing using standard Kubernetes services.
• DNS Authorization with DNS request/response aware security policy enforcement to restrict the DNS names a pod can lookup as well as limit the egress connectivity to the IPs returned in the DNS response of that particular pod.
• Transparent encryption and authentication for all service to service communication using X.509 certificates.

As always, we love hearing from you, so stop by our KubeCon booth and chat with us and other Cilium users.

First of all, huge shout-out to Alexis Ducastel for putting together a great CNI benchmark comparison. To be honest, there was definitely a moment of panic when we saw the article pop up. Did we just miss a major performance regression?

This blog post documents the investigation we have done so far of what looked like a performance regression of HTTP/FTP traffic over pure TCP.

Alexis was super quick to share the scripts that he used to collect the benchmarks numbers. This not only allowed for a quick verification but also allows us to integrate this into our CI tests and run it alongside of the existing benchmarks for better coverage.

We have covered Facebook's BPF-based load balancer with DDoS protection in a previous blog post: Why is the kernel community replacing iptables with BPF?. This post provides further details on Facebook's BPF use by covering Anant Deepak's talk at the BPF/networking microconference on Facebook's BPF-based edge firewall running in production.

The same conference also featured many other BPF related talks which we will cover in follow-up blog posts. In particular interesting will be Nikita V. Shirokov's (Facebook) talk XDP: 1.5 years in production. Evolution and lessons learned where Nikita shows the impressive difference between IPVS and BPF under heavy load as well as Vlad Dumitrescu from Google talking about Scaling Linux Traffic Shaping with BPF where Vlad and others share their experience deploying BPF to production solving scalable traffic shaping.

We are excited to announce the Cilium 1.3 release. The release introduces several new features. The major highlight of the release is the addition of Go extensions for Envoy as well as Cassandra and Memcached protocol parsers with policy enforcement capability, both implemented as Envoy Go extension.

As usual, a big shout out to the entire community of Cilium developers who have contributed 785 commits in the time period between 1.2 and 1.3.

What are Envoy Go extensions?

We have been relying on Envoy for all processing of HTTP and gRPC as well as HTTP derivates such as Elasticsearch since version 1.0. As the community discussed how to extend the scope of supported L7 protocols, it became clear that Envoy is the right platform to drive future protocol additions. The focus quickly shifted to finding ways to simplify the extendability of Envoy and allow reuse of existing open source projects such as the CNCF project Vitess. The idea of Go extensions for Envoy was born.

With Cilium 1.3, we introduce Go extensions for Envoy as a Beta feature.

Cilium provides API-aware network security for cloud-native applications. Here's a How-To guide to get you going easily with Kubernetes and Cilium on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.