[FridgeSeal]

It’s like Cilium + Hubble but useful for you don’t/can’t run cilium. Uses eBPF to collect metrics and stats on what flows where, can record an impressive amount of stuff, without any required instrumentation of your applications. Amazingly handy for when you run both first party and 3rd party apps in your K8s cluster. The network maps these tools produce are handy too.

Although, Cilium is pretty great, so not sure why you wouldn’t run it, given the option…

[hosh]

Cillium has been bought out by Cisco, so its monetization is only a matter of time.

Also, not everyone needs to implement a service mesh.

[candiddevmike]

Cillium is a CNCF project and Apache 2 licensed. Isovalent and their enterprise product were bought by Cisco.

[FridgeSeal]

Neither Cilium nor Hubble are service meshes.

Cilium is a CNI - the functionality that provides the K8s cluster inter-pod networking. The fact that it uses eBPF to deliver its functionality is what gives it the impressive observability you usually only get from a service mesh. I agree that not everyone needs a service mesh.

[nullify88]

You are right that cilium is a CNI but one of its many features is also providing a sidecar-less service mesh using eBPF. https://cilium.io/use-cases/service-mesh/