- XDP Load Balancing Support: eXpress Data Path (XDP) is the fast-lane for networking in the Linux kernel, built on eBPF. We've extended our existing eBPF kube-proxy replacement to accelerate service forwarding by 5x in our tests while dramatically reducing CPU consumption at the same time.
- Cluster-wide Flow API: Hubble Relay builds on the solid core of Hubble and Cilium to provide deep observability across the entire cluster via a centralized API with minimal overhead.
- Better policy visibility and control: ClusterwideNetworkPolicy now supports matching hosts in the cluster to implement Host network security protection, and all policy types gain named ports support. New community contributors have built eBPF notifications for Policy Verdicts and a Policy Audit mode to incrementally deploy network policies in your cluster.
- Performance optimizations across the board: We've improved the performance and resource usage in almost every dimension in this release, from improving CRD scalability and optimizing the Cilium agent's memory footprint to various performance enhancements in our eBPF data path and size reduction of the Cilium container image. Hubble has been optimized to minimize resource usage by embedding the core functionality into the Cilium agent.
- Making more functionality iptables-free: We've worked hard on improving Cilium's service implementations to further reduce the dependence on external tools based on iptables. Several features are now implemented natively in eBPF, ranging from Session Affinity and HostPort to IP masquerade agent and IP fragmentation support. (More details) Many more features: Native Azure IPAM provides better integration for Azure Cloud via a new IPAM plugin, datapath load balancing support was extended to support environments with multiple native devices, and initial support for ARM64 has been added with docker image snapshots.