Cilium, eBPF, and Modern Kubernetes Networking with Bill Mulligan

About this episode

Bill Mulligan discusses the role of eBPF and Cilium in modern Kubernetes networking.

Modern cloud-native systems are built on highly dynamic, distributed infrastructure where containers spin up and down constantly, services communicate across clusters, and traditional networking assumptions break down. Linux networking was designed decades ago around static IPs and linear rule processing, which makes it increasingly difficult to achieve scale in Kubernetes environments. At the same time, modifying the Linux kernel to keep up with these demands is slow, risky, and impractical for most organizations. The Extended Berkeley Packet Filter, or eBPF, is a Linux kernel technology that allows sandboxed programs to run safely inside the kernel without modifying kernel source code or loading kernel modules. Cilium is an open-source, cloud-native networking platform that’s built on eBPF, and provides, secures, and observes connectivity between workloads in Kubernetes and other distributed environments. Bill Mulligan is a maintainer in the Cilium ecosystem and a member of the team at Isovalent, the company behind Cilium. He joins the show with Gregor Vand to discuss how eBPF works under the hood, why Cilium has become one of the most widely adopted Kubernetes networking…

People in this episode

Host: Gregor Vand

Guest: Bill Mulligan

Topics covered

• Kubernetes
• cloud-native networking
• eBPF
• Cilium
• Linux kernel
• distributed systems

Keywords

• Kubernetes
• Cilium
• eBPF
• cloud-native
• Linux networking
• distributed infrastructure

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Cilium, Isovalent, Linux

Products: eBPF

Places: Singapore

More episodes of Software Engineering Daily

• Web Native Game Development · June 4, 2026 · 52 min
• The Hardware Bottleneck AI Can’t Fix · June 2, 2026 · 51 min
• Autonomous Drone Delivery at Scale · May 28, 2026 · 50 min
• The European Startup Scene · May 26, 2026 · 47 min
• React Native at Scale · May 21, 2026 · 47 min
• Formal Methods as Agent Guardrails · May 19, 2026 · 50 min