Learning eBPF

Preface

In the cloud native community and beyond, eBPF has become one of the hottest technical topics of recent years. A new generation of powerful tools and projects in networking, security, observability, and more have been built (and more continue to be created) using eBPF as a platform, offering better performance and accuracy compared to their predecessors. eBPF-related conferences such as the eBPF Summit and Cloud Native eBPF Day have attracted thousands of attendees and viewers, and at the time of this writing, the eBPF Slack community has more than 14,000 members.

Why is eBPF being selected as the underlying technology for so many infrastructure tools? How does it deliver the promised improvements to performance? How is eBPF useful in such disparate technical fields, which range from performance tracing to network traffic encryption?

This book aims to answer these questions by giving the reader an understanding of how eBPF works, as well as providing an introduction to writing eBPF code.

Who This Book Is For

This book is for developers, system administrators, operators, and students who are curious about eBPF and want to know more about how it works. It will provide a foundation for those who want to explore writing eBPF programs themselves. Since eBPF provides a great platform for a whole new generation of instrumentation and tooling, there will likely be gainful employment for eBPF developers for some years to come.

But you don’t necessarily need to be planning to write ...