🤔 What is eBPF?
The Tech Caffeine #38: This Week in Tech
👉 Top Five
1️⃣ eBay recently published an article about a lightweight distributed architecture to release thousands of libraries in parallel.
2️⃣ Here is how Netflix Content Engineering makes a federated graph searchable
3️⃣ There’s a lot of power in where you focus your attention. Choosing your north start matric is essential if you are a budding startup or an established enterprise. Here is a framework to select the correct north start metric.
4️⃣ If you are looking to improve your System Design skills, Amazon Builder’s Library is a great source.
5️⃣ Last week if you struggled with access to JIRA or other Atlassian services, you may be interested in understanding what really happened.
🤿 The Deep Dive
What is eBPF?
The Linux Kernel consists of two parts —
User Space
Kernel Space
User Space is a place where regular applications run, whereas Kernel space is where most operating system-related processes run.
The Kernel space has direct & full access to the hardware. Every time application in User Space needs to connect to hardware; it does so via calling APIs in Kernel space. Separating these two provides security benefits, and in the majority of the applications, this is good enough.
eBPF allows user-space applications to package the logic to be executed in the Kernel space without changing the Kernel code or reloading.
Since eBPF programs run in the Kernel space, they have visibility across all processes and applications. Hence they can be used for many things: network performance, security, tracing, and firewalls.
Use Cases
Cilium is open-source software for providing, securing, and observing network connectivity between container workloads - cloud-native, and fueled by the revolutionary Kernel technology eBPF.
Falco is a behavior analysis tool that detects anomalies in the application using eBPF
Katran is an open-source eBPF project to build a high-performance layer 4 load balancing forwarding plane.
etc.
