2026-10-01 –, Galerie
A decade ago, container networking was in its infancy, relying heavily on complex bridges and iptables rules. Today, the landscape has fundamentally shifted towards highly performant, secure, and observable dataplanes powered by eBPF.
In this talk, a core contributor to Cilium reflects on a decade of building container networking solutions - from the early days of Weave Net to modern eBPF-based architectures. We will explore the hard-fought engineering lessons from migrating away from traditional kernel bottlenecks and discuss how Cilium evolved into the most widely used container networking plugin (CNI) and a foundational platform for advanced networking research. Finally, we will look to the horizon to discuss what the next decade of Linux system networking holds.
Martynas is a Software Engineer at Isovalent at Cisco working on Cilium and eBPF. In his spare time he enjoys spending time in mountains.