Kubernetes Day 2 Challenges - Isovalent Brings Secure Connectivity and Funding

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There is no doubt that Kubernetes has become the new enterprise standard for building and operating modern applications.

According to the annual survey of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), 96% of companies use or evaluate the container orchestration system.

Thus, today's telecom enterprises and carriers are past the Day 1 phase of Kubernetes, said Dan Wendlandt, CEO of Isovalent.

And, as they enter the Day 2 phase, organizations are discovering that Kubernetes alone does not provide a network layer with security, observability, reliability, and performance required for more critical workloads, he pointed out. .

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This has spurred demand for open source technologies, including Cilium and eBPF. To help meet these ever-growing needs, Isovalent today announced the closing of a $40 million Series B funding round. The company created the Cilium project and provides Isovalent Cilium Enterprise, both technologies enabled by the new eBPF Linux kernel technology.

"eBPF is the most interesting thing to happen to Linux in the last 10 or even 20 years," Wendlandt said. And, while Isovalent started as an "all-inclusive" bet on technology and Kubernetes, "we're still in the early days of seeing all the ways Cilium and eBPF will transform the modern infrastructure layer."

> Kubernetes Challenges Day 2 "Which Kubernetes distribution should I use?" » "How do I migrate my initial applications to Kubernetes?" »

These are common Day 1 questions. But now that companies have "understood" how to run Kubernetes themselves, they're tackling Day 2 challenges, such as:

"How can I troubleshoot connectivity issues or poor performance between two services running in Kubernetes?" "How does my security team investigate an incident in my Kubernetes environment?" »

Not only does Kubernetes lack built-in capabilities to address these issues, traditional network infrastructure devices (firewalls, network load balancers, network monitors) are also limited in filling the gaps, a said Wendlandt. These devices then become bottlenecks, given the explosion of API communication between modern applications. Likewise, their focus on traditional packet-layer identity means they cannot understand the details of service identity and API calls in modern workloads.

Cilium addresses these challenges by providing a secure and observable multi-cloud and on-premises connectivity fabric. This runs directly in the Linux kernel with every application workload.

“This leap in technology allows Isovalent to provide rich context and information to security teams and operators,” Wendlandt said.

Make eBPF consumable

eBPF undoubtedly fueled Cilum's rapid rise, Wendlandt said. "eBPF basically allows us to teach new tricks to the Linux kernel," he said.

Without it, Linux's networking stack is largely made up of code that hasn't changed much in 20 years, he said, and was designed at a time when Linux ran either on a standalone server, or on a network device connecting static service...