cilium/cilium

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

25014 stars · 3993 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Cilium is an open-source networking, security, and observability solution for Kubernetes and container workloads built on an eBPF-based dataplane. It provides L3-L7 network policy enforcement, distributed load balancing, kube-proxy replacement, and deep visibility using identity-based security decoupled from network addressing.

Use cases

• replace kube-proxy in a kubernetes cluster
• enforce network policies between pods at L3-L7
• observe and troubleshoot network traffic in kubernetes
• implement a service mesh without sidecars
• secure multi-cluster container networking
• manage ingress and egress gateways
• monitor network flows with eBPF

When to choose

• you run Kubernetes on Linux and want eBPF-based CNI networking
• you need scalable load balancing and kube-proxy replacement
• you require identity-based L3-L7 network security policies
• you want deep network observability and Hubble-based flow visibility

When to avoid

• your hosts run kernels too old for required eBPF features
• you need a simple non-Kubernetes network setup
• your team cannot operate a kernel-level dataplane or lacks Linux expertise

Facets

service · maturity stable

networking security monitoring tracing load-testing api-gateway networking security cloud-computing monitoring microservices go cloud self-hosted ebpf cni kubernetes-networking xdp service-mesh kube-proxy-replacement cncf network-policy loadbalancing containers devops linux kubernetes docker

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