Cilium 1.6: KVstore-free operation, 100% kube-proxy replacement, Socket-based load-balancing

We are excited to announce the Cilium 1.6 release. A total of 1408 commits have been contributed by the community with many developers contributing for the first time. Cilium 1.6 introduces several exciting new features: KVStore free operation:

The addition of a new CRD-based backend for security identities now allows to operate Cilium entirely without a KVstore in the context of Kubernetes. (More details) KVStore free operation:

Socket-based load-balancing: Socket-based load-balancing combines the advantage of client-side and network-based load-balancing by providing fully transparent load-balancing using Kubernetes services with the translation from service IP to endpoint IP done once during connection establishment instead of translating each network packet for the lifetime of a connection. (More details) Socket-based load-balancing: Policy scalability improvements: The entire policy system has been improved to decouple handling of policy and identity definitions and moving to an entirely incremental model.

This ensures that environments with high pod scheduling churn, e.g. several 100K pods across multiple clusters, can cope well in combination with constant policy definition changes. (More details) Policy scalability improvements: Generic CNI chaining: The 1.6 release introduces a new CNI chaining framework allowing to run Cilium on top of the majority of other CNI plugins such as Weave, Calico, Flannel, AWS VPC CNI or the Lyft CNI plugin. This enables using advanced features such as eBPF-based security policy enforcement, visibility, multi-cluster, encryption, and load-balancing while continuing to run whatever CNI plugin is already in-use.

(More details)

Source: cilium.io