The Cilium project’s github code repository defines the effort as Linux Native, HTTP Aware Network Security for Containers. Cilium development has been driven to date by stealth startup Covalent which is led by CEO Dan Wendlandt who well known in the networking community for his work at VMware on Software Defined Networking and CTO Thomas Graf who is a core Linux kernel networking developer.
“I actually helped to develop alot of the legacy networking tooling like IPtables and routing and at some point I realized that all of that doesn’t really fit into this new world of micro-services,” Graf said. “At the same time the new technology that is BPF has been coming up and I connected the dots and that’s where Cilium started two years ago.”