Media and Entertainment

The Media and Entertainment industry is navigating a digital transformation era with scalability, security, and latency challenges—traditional tooling struggles to handle rising consumer demands for high-quality, on-demand media. Security vulnerabilities can threaten valuable content and customer data, while latency issues undermine user experience. Rising operational costs and increasingly stringent regulatory environments compound these challenges.

Media companies must deliver high-quality content to a vast and global audience. This requires infrastructure that can handle spikes in demand, especially during live events and popular content releases. Cilium offers intelligent load balancing, ensuring that the high volume of user requests typical for OTT platforms are distributed efficiently. This results in consistent content and smooth media experiences for end users. Load balancing across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud clusters is easier to configure and operate with Cilium, allowing the design of more resilient and fault-tolerant infrastructure.

Leverage the Cilium advantage to deliver seamless experiences to your users, reduce operational complexity for your teams, and secure your environments.

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Perhaps the most important feature from Hubble UI is the network flow itself. If you look deeper into the flow you’ll see full deep rich information about every single packet traversed between different services. And that’s important so that we can build understanding of how traffic is flung between services.
Ahmed Bebars — Software Engineer, Delivery Engineering, The New York Times

Cilium was a critical choice to increase networking performance while providing identity and application-aware security and visibility for cloud native workloads running on EKS at The New York Times.

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Global Content Delivery at Scale with Cilium's Load Balancing

Companies in the media and entertainment industry with strict latency and failover requirements can benefit from Cilium's scalable load balancing with XDP, an eBPF-based high-performance data path. Production users found it doubled throughput while reducing CPU usage by 72x. Cilium's standalone Layer 4 load balancer comes at a fraction of the cost of traditional hardware load balancers while delivering higher performance.

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Under synthetic load tests, IPVS began dropping packets around 3Mpps, whereas L4LB XDP managed up to 14.8Mpps before experiencing issues. In real-world applications, L4LB XDP demonstrated significantly better efficiency, handling similar traffic rates as IPVS but using only half a CPU compared to IPVS's 2x18 CPUs. The results indicate Cilium's L4LB XDP superior performance and efficiency over IPVS.
Ondrej Blazek — Infrastructure Engineer, Seznam.com

Seznam.cz tested Cilium's Standalone L4LB XDP as an alternative to their IPVS load balancer due to increasing traffic concerns.

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Robust Security, Scalability, and Flexibility at a Reduced Operational Overhead

Many companies in the media and entertainment industries maintain legacy infrastructure for varying reasons. Cilium is flexible enough to integrate with both traditional and cloud native infrastructures. Companies like Cosmonic have extended Cilium beyond Kubernetes to platforms like Nomad. In scenarios where it is impossible to use Cilium as the Default CNI, Cilium's CNI chaining mode lets you utilize Cilium's features like Hubble for observability and Tetragon for security. Companies running workloads on non-k8s environments can leverage Cilium's Layer 4 standalone load balancer for efficient and scalable load balancing. This flexibility ensures your organization can benefit from Cilium regardless of your infrastructure choices.

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See Real World Stories on Companies in the Media and Entertainment Industry

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Software L4 Load Balancing for Kubernetes Services at Yahoo

Yahoo improved load balancing performance and scalability by switching to Cilium L4 LB with XDP, achieving hardware-level efficiency and dynamic backend management.

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Designing and Securing a Multi-Tenant Runtime Environment at the New York Times

Cilium was a critical choice to increase networking performance while providing identity and application-aware security and visibility for cloud native workloads running on EKS at the New York Times.

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Zero Trust Networking at Scale (20k+ VCPUs, 100+ Dev Teams)

Sky required a performant and secure solution to help them implement zero-trust network security and landed on leveraging additional features in Cilium as the answer.

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Scaling Network Performance and Cutting Costs with Cilium

Cilium has become the go-to solution for replacing kube-proxy in SmartNews' new Kubernetes clusters. It boosted their network performance and offered a cost-efficient solution during peak loads. Overall, Cilium has significantly improved the team's capability to offer a secure and high-performance Kubernetes platform, enhancing user experience.

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Cilium’s Solutions for Media and Entertainment

Load Balancing

Leverage the power of Cilium’s XDP acceleration for high-speed, efficient Load Balancing in your Kubernetes cluster

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Bandwidth and Latency Optimization

Optimize TCP and UDP workload with rate limiting and fair queuing. Rely on our TCP congestion control algorithm for improved performance

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Service Map

Enable platform teams to provide a self-service portal to app teams to observe their own workloads, dependencies, and network flows

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