Post date: Jun 17, 2017 8:43:49 AM
Cilium is open source software for providing and transparently securing network connectivity and load-balancing between application containers and services deployed using Linux container management platforms like Docker and Kubernetes.
Internally, Cilium uses a relatively new technology called XDP (eXpress Data Plane).
XDP provides a way of seamlessly inserting code (eBPF) at the front of a network card driver(must written to support XDP). To support this, XDP uses a technology called eBPF (extended Berkley Packet Filter). The eBPF code can be attached to hooks in the Linux kernel. The eBPF code used by XDP provides a decision logic to drop, process or forward a network packet.