Security & observability for all apps - combining the Cilium & Kernel powers
04-16, 15:50–16:20 (Europe/Amsterdam), The Warehouse

Securing your applications with a defense in depth architecture and gaining visibility in your application behavior are the two key requirements to be successful in any modern cloud native deployment.
While service meshes like Istio provide these capabilities via a user space proxy mechanism it's not always feasible to inject sidecars proxies for all your applications. On the other hand Kernel technologies like eBPF when used in a CNI like Cilium provides security and metrics transparently but lacks the richness of information and policy capabilities provided by a layer 7 proxy with strong identities.
In this session, I will present how we can leverage capabilities provided by both these technologies and achieve better security and observability ensuring all your applications can have uniform policy and visibility irrespective of whether they are in the mesh or not or if they are running as a container in Kubernetes or long running VM where making privileged changes are often not possible.


Understanding the eBPF concepts can be tricky especially for beginners who might have less experience with Linux kernel and that’s why we aim to present our talk with a beginner’s lens. Through this talk, we aim to lower the entry barrier for the people who are on the fence and are skeptical to contribute just because of the overlying complexity they might feel. This will greatly benefit the CNCF ecosystem as it will lead to more fresh minds coming as contributors who will potentially be the future faces of the ecosystem. Technically this talk will also benefit the ecosystem in this way that it will talk about the best practices involved in observability and security ecosystem and how we can increase the adoption of eBPF using different use-cases. Attendees will gain a good understanding of how Istio, cilium and eBPF interact with each other and how to use them effectively in their environment.

I am a Developer Advocate at solo.io, and a Community evangelist running Keep Up as well as the DevOps community to empower students and professionals to succeed in their careers. As a speaker and panelist, I am actively participating in various conferences to bring awareness around DevOps, Security, and Application networking.

Shivay Lamba is a software developer specializing in DevOps, Machine Learning and Full Stack Development.

He is an Open Source Enthusiast and has been part of various programs like Google Code In and Google Summer of Code as a Mentor and has also been a MLH Fellow. He is actively involved in community work as well. He is a TensorflowJS SIG member, Mentor in OpenMined and CNCF Service Mesh Community, SODA Foundation and has given talks at various conferences like Github Satellite, Voice Global, Fossasia Tech Summit, TensorflowJS Show & Tell.