BPF for security—and chaos—in Kubernetes

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019 there were multiple sessions with BPF in the title where developers talked about how BPF can be used to help with Kubernetes security, monitoring, and even chaos engineering testing. We will look at two of those talks that were led by engineers closely aligned with the open-source Cilium project, which is all about bringing BPF to Kubernetes container environments. Thomas Graf, who contributes to BPF development in the Linux kernel, led a session on transparent chaos testing with Envoy, Cilium, and BPF, while his counterpart Dan Wendlandt, who is well known in the OpenStack community for helping to start the Neutron networking project, spoke about using the kernel’s BPF capabilities to add visibility and security in a Kubernetes-aware manner.