Cilium: Up and Running

Foreword

When we started working on Cilium, none of us imagined how far the journey would take us. What began as an ambitious idea—to rethink networking and security for cloud native systems using eBPF—turned into a mission shared by an incredible group of engineers, users, and open source contributors. The journey of Cilium has been nothing short of amazing: from working with the very first wave of users trying to get Kubernetes into production, to partnering with some of the largest enterprises running massive fleets of Kubernetes clusters powered by Cilium and eBPF.

Cilium was built in the open, shaped by a community that believed in a better way of doing cloud native networking and security. Every design decision, feature, and improvement was influenced by real-world feedback from operators running production systems, contributors pushing boundaries, and users who trusted us with their most critical workloads. The community didn’t just adopt Cilium—it helped build it. For that, I am deeply grateful.

I vividly remember the early days when simply getting a basic ping working between two Kubernetes pods felt like a breakthrough. The days when we had to support Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos at the same time, because the ecosystem had not yet settled on a single orchestration standard. The excitement when we got traceroute working properly by implementing full ICMP support. The moment we scaled our first Kubernetes cluster to 5,000 nodes and realized we were entering an entirely ...