Introduction to Cilium

When you deploy Kubernetes, you need to install a networking plug-in implementing the Container Networking Interface (CNI) to provide connectivity between workloads. Cilium is a popular and widely-deployed CNI solution that is now the default across many Kubernetes distributions and cloud provider offerings.

In this course, you will learn the basics of Cilium and how it can be used to connect, observe, and secure Kubernetes clusters. We will start by reviewing Kubernetes container networking and its challenges. We’ll move on to discussing the architecture of Cilium and how it uses eBPF to address those challenges. eBPF is a Linux technology that allows changing the kernel’s behavior through dynamically loaded custom programs. We’ll provide an overview of what eBPF is and how Cilium uses it to benefit cloud native networking.

We will provide a step-by-step guide for installing and setting up Cilium as your CNI. Once installed, we will show how to configure basic network policies to secure your network and how we can use Hubble to observe these network flows. Finally, we will discuss some of the commonly used features of Cilium, such as support for FQDN-based and L7 protocol-aware network policies, and cluster mesh networking.

By the end of this course, you will understand how Cilium and Hubble work and how they can be used to connect, observe, and secure your cloud native environments.