Certified Red Hat OpenShift CNI Plug-in

We are pleased to introduce the availability of Cilium in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog as well as the certification of Cilium as a Certified OpenShift CNI Plug-in. The Container Network Interface (CNI) badge is a specialization within Red Hat OpenShift certification available to networking products that integrate with OpenShift using a CNI plug-in. Users running OpenShift can feel confident that running Cilium will not negatively impact their Red Hat support experience.

The OpenShift certified version of Cilium is based on Red Hat Universal Base Images and passes the Operator certification requirements as well as the Kubernetes e2e tests.

What is Cilium?

Cilium is open source software for transparently providing and securing the network and API connectivity between application services deployed using Linux container management platforms such as Kubernetes.

At the foundation of Cilium is a new Linux kernel technology called eBPF, which enables the dynamic insertion of powerful security, visibility, and networking control logic within Linux itself. eBPF is utilized to provide functionality such as multi-cluster routing, load balancing to replace kube-proxy, transparent encryption as well as network and service security. Besides providing traditional network-level security, the flexibility of eBPF enables security with the context of application protocols and DNS requests/responses. Cilium is tightly integrated with Envoy and provides an extension framework based on Go. Because eBPF runs inside the Linux kernel, all Cilium functionality can be applied without any changes to the application code or container configuration.

See the section Introduction to Cilium for a more detailed general introduction to Cilium.

Installation

To install Cilium on OpenShift, go to the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog and follow the deploy instructions:

If you have any questions regarding running Cilium on OpenShift, don't hesitate to reach join the Cilium slack and ask your questions in #general channel.