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WARNING: You are looking at unreleased Cilium documentation. Please use the official rendered version released here: http://docs.cilium.io
Cilium is open source software for transparently securing the network connectivity between application services deployed using Linux container management platforms like Docker and Kubernetes.
At the foundation of Cilium is a new Linux kernel technology called BPF, which enables the dynamic insertion of powerful security visibility and control logic within Linux itself. Because BPF runs inside the Linux kernel, Cilium security policies can be applied and updated without any changes to the application code or container configuration.
The development of modern datacenter applications has shifted to a service-oriented architecture often referred to as microservices, wherein a large application is split into small independent services that communicate with each other via APIs using lightweight protocols like HTTP. Microservices applications tend to be highly dynamic, with individual containers getting started or destroyed as the application scales out / in to adapt to load changes and during rolling updates that are deployed as part of continuous delivery.
This shift toward highly dynamic microservices presents both a challenge and an opportunity in terms of securing connectivity between microservices. Traditional Linux network security approaches (e.g., iptables) filter on IP address and TCP/UDP ports, but IP addresses frequently churn in dynamic microservices environments. The highly volatile life cycle of containers causes these approaches to struggle to scale side by side with the application as load balancing tables and access control lists carrying hundreds of thousands of rules that need to be updated with a continuously growing frequency. Protocol ports (e.g. TCP port 80 for HTTP traffic) can no longer be used to differentiate between application traffic for security purposes as the port is utilized for a wide range of messages across services.
An additional challenge is the ability to provide accurate visibility as traditional systems are using IP addresses as primary identification vehicle which may have a drastically reduced lifetime of just a few seconds in microservices architectures.
By leveraging Linux BPF, Cilium retains the ability to transparently insert security visibility + enforcement, but does so in a way that is based on service / pod / container identity (in contrast to IP address identification in traditional systems) and can filter on application-layer (e.g. HTTP). As a result, Cilium not only makes it simple to apply security policies in a highly dynamic environment by decoupling security from addressing, but can also provide stronger security isolation by operating at the HTTP-layer in addition to providing traditional Layer 3 and Layer 4 segmentation.
The use of BPF enables Cilium to achieve all of this in a way that is highly scalable even for large-scale environments.