Learn about Cilium with interactive courses

Deep dive into Cilium and its features with labs provided by companies within the Cilium ecosystem

SecurityFrom Isovalent

Cilium Host Firewall

Ever since its inception, Cilium has supported Kubernetes Network Policies to enforce traffic control to and from pods at L3/L4. But Cilium Network Policies even go even further: by leveraging eBPF, it can provide greater visibility into packets and enforce traffic policies at L7 and can filter traffic based on criteria such as FQDN, protocol (such as kafka, grpc), etc… Creating and manipulating these Network Policies is done declaratively using YAML manifests. What if we could apply the Kubernetes Network Policy operating model to our hosts? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a consistent security model across not just our pods, but also the hosts running the pods? Let’s look at how the Cilium Host Firewall can achieve this. In this lab, we will install SSH on the nodes of a Kind cluster, then create Cluster-wide Network Policies to regulate how the nodes can be accessed using SSH. The Control Plane node will be used as a bastion to access the other nodes in the cluster.

SecurityFrom Isovalent

Cilium Transparent Encryption with IPSec and WireGuard

Encryption is required for many compliance frameworks. Kubernetes doesn’t natively offer pod-to-pod encryption. To offer encryption capabilities, it’s often required to implement it directly into your applications or deploy a Service Mesh. Both options add complexity and operational headaches. Cilium actually provides two options to encrypt traffic between Cilium-managed endpoints: IPsec and WireGuard. In this lab, you will be installing and testing both features and will get to experience how easy it is to encrypt data in transit with Cilium.

SecurityFrom Isovalent

Mutual Authentication with Cilium

Introduced in Cilium 1.14 is support for a much-requested feature: mutual authentication. From its inception, we looked at delivering an optimal effortless user experience to achieve mutual authentication. The result is simple: add 2 lines of YAML to your Cilium Network Policy, and that’s it – your workload communication is now secured with a mutual TLS handshake. Try it in this new Star Wars-inspired lab!