February 2026
Intermediate to advanced
372 pages
9h 2m
English
Content preview from Cilium: Up and Running
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Chapter 8. Performance Networking and Traffic Optimization
So far we have focused on getting access and connectivity working with Cilium. Outside of the eBPF-based kube-proxy replacement we covered in Chapter 6, we have yet to discuss network performance.
Our goal is not just to help you run Cilium; it is to help you get as much value and performance out of it as possible. A network tool is often judged on throughput, latency, and jitter, and the same goes for Cilium.
In this chapter, we will review some of the Cilium features that enable you to optimize network performance. We will not cover them all; to avoid overwhelming the reader with too much information, we decided to leave out topics like Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR), BIG TCP, and eBPF host routing.
Note
Excluding topics is a difficult choice. To briefly summarize their value:
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BBR is a modern congestion control algorithm that improves throughput and reduces latency on long or high-bandwidth connections.
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BIG TCP increases efficiency for large-scale data transfers by allowing larger packet sizes, reducing per-packet overhead.
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eBPF host routing bypasses parts of the traditional networking stack to deliver faster packet forwarding directly within the kernel.
The Isovalent blog covers BBR and BIG TCP in numerous posts. eBPF host-routing is enabled by default if your kernel supports it, so it does not require further explanation here.
We will focus on a set of features that boost performance ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.