Some of the biggest IT companies, including Meta, Netflix, Google, Isovalent, Microsoft, and others, together formed the eBPF foundation on August 12, 2021. The brief of this was discussed in the eBPF Summit, a virtual event conducted during August 18- 19, 2021.

The introduction of Docker and Kubernetes has brought a dramatic revolution in the IT industry. Unlike the traditional methods of developing and deploying software, Kubernetes or K8s uses scaling and automated deployment. Thanks to the Linux functionalities that make Kubernetes run seamlessly with robust security.

When it comes to integrating security, networking, and observability features, working within the Linux kernel is perfect. It is not, however, without its difficulties. Historically, developers have encountered complex architectures and difficult-to- debug abstraction layers, altered kernel source code or added modules. Both of these issues are addressed by the extended BPF (eBPF).

Liz Rice is Chief Open Source Officer with eBPF specialists Isovalent, creators of the Cilium cloud native networking, security and observability project. She was Chair of the CNCF's Technical Oversight Committee 2019-2022, and Co-Chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in 2018. She is also the author of Container Security, published by O'Reilly.

eBPF, which stands for Extended Berkeley Packet Filter, is a technology that allows Linux programs to run code in the kernel. eBPF was previously also used to construct debugging, networking, profiling, monitoring, firewalls, and other types of programs.

An in-kernel virtual machine BPF, or Berkeley Packet Filter, is known for running programs passed from user space. It was first implemented on BSD and then Linux, followed by the classic BPF (cBPF). In recent times, the BPF infrastructure in Linux has undergone a major transition and has given birth to the extended BPF – or eBPF as it is popularly called. Some of the popular use-cases where extended BPF has brought about flexibility and high performance include tracing and monitoring events on the system, enforcing access control over cgroups, and processing packets at a very low level (XDP).

The introduction of Docker and Kubernetes has brought a dramatic revolution in the IT industry. Unlike the traditional methods of developing and deploying software, Kubernetes or K8s uses scaling and automated deployment. Thanks to the Linux functionalities that make Kubernetes run seamlessly with robust security.