Cilium Maintainers Track

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026

Session Date: March 24, 2026 — London

Cilium at 10 Years

  • Everything powered by eBPF
  • Many organizations standardizing on Cilium for networking and security
  • eBPF is solving most future infrastructure challenges
  • CNCF Graduated project

Key Announcements

Feature Description
mTLS with zTunnel Mutual TLS without sidecars via Istio's zTunnel integration
Tetragon Runtime security monitoring — the "youngest sibling"
eBPF Map Monitoring Real-time network flow analysis
ipBlock Policies Fine-grained network policy enforcement

Tetragon — Runtime Security

  • Provides the 4 golden signals of observability
  • Process execution monitoring
  • Network activity tracking
  • Runtime security enforcement at the kernel level
  • No agents or sidecars — pure eBPF

Enterprise Scale: Celonis Case Study

Metric Value
Architecture Multi-cloud
Data Volume 3.5 TB per day
Request Volume 360 million requests daily
Clusters 160 clusters

Cilium proven at massive production scale.

Troubleshooting Capabilities

  • ipBlock policy monitoring for network isolation
  • eBPF map monitoring for real-time flow analysis
  • Deep integration with observability stacks
  • No performance overhead from sidecars

Key Takeaways

  1. Cilium is the de facto standard for Kubernetes networking and security
  2. zTunnel integration enables sidecar-free mTLS
  3. Tetragon brings runtime security to the eBPF ecosystem
  4. Proven at scale: 360M requests/day across 160 clusters (Celonis)
  5. eBPF is converging networking, security, and observability into one layer

Questions?

KubeCon EU 2026 — London