Cilium

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

25622 stars · 4137 forks observed · 2026-10-10

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-10-12, confidence 0.97

Cilium is an eBPF‑based networking, security, and observability solution for Kubernetes clusters. It provides a flat L3 network, L7‑aware policies, and can replace kube‑proxy with high‑performance load balancing.

Use cases

• Implement secure network policies for Kubernetes pods
• Replace kube-proxy with high‑performance eBPF load balancing
• Gain deep visibility and monitoring of container traffic
• Deploy a service mesh without sidecar proxies
• Enforce L3‑L7 security controls based on pod identities

When to choose

• You need a high‑performance, scalable CNI for Kubernetes
• You want native eBPF‑based security and observability
• You require L7‑aware network policies and load balancing
• You are building a service mesh without additional proxies

When to avoid

• Your environment does not support eBPF (e.g., older kernels)
• You need a simple networking solution without advanced security features
• You are not running on Linux or Kubernetes

Facets

service · maturity stable

security monitoring microservices networking cloud-computing cni ebpf k8s layer3 layer7 distributed-load-balancing ingress-egress-gateway bandwidth-management load-balancing containers devops linux docker kubernetes

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="cilium/cilium")