Cisco’s Acquisition of Isovalent: Ushering in a New Era in eBPF Technology and Network Management

In today’s cloud-native applications, networking and security are critical components for ensuring the seamless operation and protection of workloads across diverse cloud infrastructures. Recognizing this importance, Cisco has partnered with Isovalent to enhance networking and security capabilities through advanced technologies such as eBPF and Cilium. This partnership aims to empower software-defined networking, provide analysis and optimization tools, enable a programmable network data path, eliminate NAT overhead, gather context-rich data, offer enhanced workload protection, and integrate seamlessly with existing infrastructure. Let’s delve into the details of how this collaboration brings significant advancements to the cloud-native environment.

Empowering Software-Defined Networking

eBPF and Cilium form the backbone of Cisco and Isovalent’s efforts to enhance networking and security capabilities. By leveraging eBPF, users gain the ability to establish a high-performance, programmable network data path between applications and clusters. This breakthrough technology enables the implementation of advanced application service features such as firewalls, load balancing, and DNS. With Cilium, all of these application-level features can be accessed and managed from a single software location, providing unparalleled convenience and efficiency.

Analysis and Optimization

In addition to empowering software-defined networking, the combination of eBPF and Cilium enables network experts to analyze network traffic and monitor container behavior. This capability allows for effective troubleshooting of issues and optimization of performance. By gaining deep visibility into network traffic and container behavior, network experts can identify and resolve bottlenecks, detect anomalies, and ensure the smooth operation of cloud-native applications.

Programmable Network Data Path

One of the key advantages of eBPF is its contribution to establishing a programmable network data path. By setting up a high-performance data path, applications and clusters can communicate more efficiently, resulting in improved performance and reduced latency. This programmability offers flexibility to customize the network data path based on specific application requirements, enhancing the overall efficiency and reliability of communication within the cloud-native environment.

Efficient Load Balancing and NAT Elimination

Traditional load balancing techniques often involve network address translation (NAT) overhead, which can impact performance and scalability. However, with the partnership between Cisco and Isovalent, operators can now leverage eBPF programs to load balance directly at the source, eliminating the need for NAT. This approach improves performance by reducing latency and streamlining communication processes.

Context-Rich Data Gathering

eBPF programs serve as sensors in the Linux kernel, enabling the collection of context-rich data. The advantage of using eBPF for gathering data is that there is no need to make changes to the kernel, making tracing and profiling capabilities easily accessible without compromising the stability of the system. By adding probes as sensors, eBPF programs provide valuable insights into the behavior and performance of cloud-native applications, facilitating effective troubleshooting and performance optimization.

Cilium’s Success and Features

Cilium has gained significant adoption among hyperscalers and cloud providers due to its unparalleled visibility into the behavior and communication of cloud-native applications. With Cilium, network administrators can define policies for software-defined networks seamlessly, ensuring consistent and reliable communication within the cloud-native environment. The comprehensive feature set offered by Cilium includes firewalling, load balancing, DNS, and various application service-level features, all accessible and manageable from a single software location.

Enhanced Workload Protection

To further enhance workload protection, Cisco and Isovalent introduce Tetragon, a tool that provides security controls to safeguard running workloads. Tetragon gathers detailed information about the internal processes of applications and monitors their behavior on the network. By leveraging this information, network administrators can detect and mitigate threats, ensuring the security and integrity of workloads as they run within the cloud-native environment.

Integration with Existing Infrastructure

Cisco’s Cilium Mesh solution ensures easy integration of Kubernetes clusters with existing infrastructure across hybrid clouds. This capability allows organizations to leverage their current infrastructure investments while benefiting from the enhanced networking capabilities offered by Cisco and Isovalent. With seamless integration, organizations can create a unified and cohesive cloud-native environment, enhancing their agility and flexibility in deploying and managing workloads across diverse cloud infrastructures.

Future Collaboration and Open-Source Contributions

The partnership between Cisco and Isovalent marks a commitment to continuously building advanced protection for workloads on any cloud infrastructure. Both organizations will continue to contribute to the open-source projects, Cilium and Tetragon, ensuring ongoing development and improvements. Cisco also plans to establish an independent advisory board to guide its contributions, ensuring that multicloud security and networking capabilities created are truly unique and meet the evolving needs of cloud-native environments.

The collaboration between Cisco and Isovalent brings forth a new era in networking and security capabilities for cloud-native applications. By harnessing the power of eBPF and Cilium, organizations can empower software-defined networking, analyze and optimize network traffic and container behavior, establish a programmable network data path, eliminate NAT overhead, gather context-rich data, protect workloads with detailed security controls, and seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructure. With Cisco and Isovalent leading the way, organizations can confidently navigate the challenges of cloud-native environments, ensuring efficient, secure, and high-performance networking for their workloads on any cloud.

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