Keeping It Simple: Cilium Networking for Multicloud Kubernetes

The presentation discusses how Cilium and its ClusterMesh feature can simplify connectivity across multiple clusters in a cloud-agnostic way, enabling connectivity between services spread across clouds, load balancing requests across backends in multiple clusters, connectivity between Kubernetes and legacy workloads, mutually-authenticated, encrypted connections between services, and multi-cluster network policies. The presentation also addresses challenges related to IP address management, scale, and observability of multi-cluster networks, and how Cilium can help.

• Cilium and its ClusterMesh feature can simplify connectivity across multiple clusters in a cloud-agnostic way
• Connectivity between services spread across clouds
• Load balancing requests across backends in multiple clusters
• Connectivity between Kubernetes and legacy workloads
• Mutually-authenticated, encrypted connections between services
• Multi-cluster network policies
• Challenges related to IP address management, scale, and observability of multi-cluster networks, and how Cilium can help

The presenter uses Star Wars references to explain the concepts of services and endpoints in Kubernetes. They also demonstrate how to connect workloads in multiple clusters and non-Kubernetes environments using Cilium mesh.

Kubernetes promises that we can run containerized workloads in any cloud, and according to a recent article InfoWorld “2023 may [finally] be the year of multicloud Kubernetes”. For this to happen, we need seamless connectivity between workloads across clusters, regardless of the cloud they’re running on. From the perspective of a developer, shouldn’t connectivity across clouds be as simple as connectivity within a cluster? This talk explores - and demonstrates - how Cilium and its ClusterMesh feature can take care of many aspects of connectivity across multiple clusters in a cloud-agnostic way. It will show how just a few additional lines of YAML in your existing Kubernetes resources can enable: - Connectivity between services spread across clouds - Load balancing requests across backends in multiple clusters - Connectivity between Kubernetes and legacy workloads - Mutually-authenticated, encrypted connections between services - Multi-cluster network policies The talk will also discuss some of the challenges related to IP address management, scale, and observability of multi-cluster networks, and how Cilium can help.