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Cilium, eBPF, and Modern Kubernetes Networking with Bill Mulligan

Cilium, eBPF, and Modern Kubernetes Networking with Bill Mulligan

Author: Software Engineering Daily March 26, 2026 Duration: 57:30
Software Engineering Daily
Technology

Modern cloud-native systems are built on highly dynamic, distributed infrastructure where containers spin up and down constantly, services communicate across clusters, and traditional networking assumptions break down. Linux networking was designed decades ago around static IPs and linear rule processing, which makes it increasingly difficult to achieve scale in Kubernetes environments. At the same time, modifying the Linux kernel to keep up with these demands is slow, risky, and impractical for most organizations.

The Extended Berkeley Packet Filter, or eBPF, is a Linux kernel technology that allows sandboxed programs to run safely inside the kernel without modifying kernel source code or loading kernel modules. Cilium is an open-source, cloud-native networking platform that’s built on eBPF, and provides, secures, and observes connectivity between workloads in Kubernetes and other distributed environments.

Bill Mulligan is a maintainer in the Cilium ecosystem and a member of the team at Isovalent, the company behind Cilium. He joins the show with Gregor Vand to discuss how eBPF works under the hood, why Cilium has become one of the most widely adopted Kubernetes networking projects, and how the future of cloud-native infrastructure is being reshaped by programmable kernels.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

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