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.

Kubernetes clusters are used by multiple tenants to run their containerized workloads. Often, the tenant workloads are mapped to namespaces and strict access control is required for inter-namespace communications. The access control could be needed for separation of concerns such as monitoring namespace vs application namespace; for compliance such as PCI vs non-PCI workloads; or to meet requirements of serving different end customers such as workloads serving Pepsi vs Coke. In this post, we will look at namespace based segmentation of traffic along with examples of allowing specific inter-namespace communications.

We are excited to announce the Cilium 1.2 release. The release introduces several new features addressing the top asks from Cilium users and community members. One of the most exciting features is the introduction of security policies based on DNS names to secure access to external services outside of the cluster. Another top ask was to introduce the ability to connect and secure multiple Kubernetes clusters. We are introducing ClusterMesh as an alpha level feature to address this ask. It allows to connect and secure pods running in different Kubernetes clusters. Equally important is the Kube-router integration with Cilium. The effort led by the team from DigitalOcean enables to combine BGP networking provided by kube-router with BPF based security and load-balancing from Cilium. As usual, a big shout out to the entire community of Cilium developers. The total number of contributors has grown to 85 and 579 commits have been contributed in the time period between 1.1 and 1.2.