eBPF and Kubernetes

• Scaling Kubernetes
  • There are monitoring and logging systems, but its tough to monitor everything accurately in a distributed environment
  • The Kubernetes cluster does not expose kernel level monitoring data
  • Process/Service Specific Monitoring
    • Since Kubernetes Service is essentially a process run by the linux Kernel
    • With eBPF it is easy to monitor a specific process, so teams can monitor a process running across all of their infrastructure nodes.
    • More granular than logs
    • No special instrumentation needed
    • unlike the sidecar pattern eBPF install a very small overhead
• Challenges
• There is no easy way to install eBPF on all nodes of the cluster, orchestration is a challenge, they can use Cilium like tools to get more visibility into their cluster though.
• References:
  • https://searchitoperations.techtarget.com/answer/Why-and-how-to-use-eBPF-for-Kubernetes-scaling