Cilium: Up and Running

Preface

Over the past decade, Kubernetes has evolved from a cutting-edge project spawned at Google into the universal standard for how modern applications are built and operated. Brendan Burns et al.’s description of the platform in Kubernetes: Up and Running (O’Reilly) as “an open source orchestrator for deploying containerized applications” doesn’t quite do it justice. Today, Kubernetes is the preferred platform not only for containers but also for virtual machines, databases, batch processing jobs, development environments, and AI and machine learning workloads. It has followed in the footsteps of infrastructure-as-a-service, virtualization, and bare-metal servers and now provides engineers with unique abilities to run applications that have superior agility, resilience, and orchestration.

Regardless of the compute stack flavor of the year—and Kubernetes will, eventually, be replaced by something else—the networking and security requirements remain the same. Connectivity to, from, and between apps is still needed. Regulatory goals still need to be met, with data confidentiality, integrity, and resiliency remaining critical requirements. Application performance still needs to be closely monitored.

Whether you’re a seasoned platform engineer or a newcomer to the cloud native world, you may be perplexed by the vast choice of networking tools that appear to be needed to meet the aforementioned requirements. It’s a common phenomenon, and as a consequence, many clusters today are ...