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by tgraf 2051 days ago
Disclaimer: I wrote the post.

Happy to answer any questions.

2 comments

First of all, congrats. The tech is great and I hope you'll be able to make a company around it.

As for the question: How are you looking to make money?

I'm not going to spam this forum with a marketing pitch so I'll just refer to https://www.isovalent.com/product and add that you can buy a Cilium Enterprise distribution with enterprise specific add-ons from us.
At first two annoying lies in the title alone.

The Future of Networking? Networking is not only linux. eBPF is linux-only. Everyone else uses the secure variant dTrace, which has even wide-spread user-space support. So you can trace across the kernel, processes and its extensions/scripts. For decades.

Future of Security? eBPF is insecure. User-accessible arrays in the kernel can never be secure. dTrace did not do that for a reason, it was already compromised with the spectre-like attacks, and the fixes were laughable at best to safe face.

Linux might be advised to do better (or is just NIH?), but advertising Worse as Better was fashionable in the 80ies only.

I personally think that networking will be almost exclusively based Linux in some form. If you want to interpret it as "eBPF - The Future of Linux Networking" then that is totally fine as well. That said, eBPF-based networking can be offloaded to SmartNICs already so it may be less Linux specific than you seem to assume right now.

Comparing dTrace and eBPF is definitely a very interesting question. I've actually asked Brendan Gregg in the Q&A of his keynote at eBPF summit this year how he compares dTrace and eBPF these days. Here is his answer (jumps right to the specific question): https://youtu.be/jw8tEPP6jwQ?t=4618

I doubt that eBPF will remain a Linux-only technology. Ports to FreeBSD are already underway it seems [0] and Microsoft declared intent to invest into eBPF [1]. I'm not sure what that means on timeline for eBPF availability on Windows though. There are also several user space implementations for eBPF which could become interesting to provide a universal programmability approach across traditional kernels like Linux, microkernels like Snap and application kernels like gVisor.

[0] https://papers.freebsd.org/2018/bsdcan/hayakawa-ebpf_impleme... [1] https://twitter.com/markrussinovich/status/12830391539203686...