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What is eBPF?Project Landscape

eBPF is a revolutionary technology with origins in the Linux kernel that can run sandboxed programs in an operating system kernel. It is used to safely and efficiently extend the capabilities of the kernel without requiring to change kernel source code or load kernel modules.

Historically, the operating system has always been an ideal place to implement observability, security, and networking functionality due to the kernel’s privileged ability to oversee and control the entire system. At the same time, an operating system kernel is hard to evolve due to its central role and high requirement towards stability and security. The rate of innovation at the operating system level has thus traditionally been lower compared to functionality implemented outside of the operating system.

eBPF changes this formula fundamentally. By allowing to run sandboxed programs within the operating system, application developers can run eBPF programs to add additional capabilities to the operating system at runtime. The operating system then guarantees safety and execution efficiency as if natively compiled with the aid of a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler and verification engine. This has led to a wave of eBPF-based projects covering a wide array of use cases, including next-generation networking, observability, and security functionality.

Today, eBPF is used extensively to drive a wide variety of use cases: Providing high-performance networking and load-balancing in modern data centers and cloud native environments, extracting fine-grained security observability data at low overhead, helping application developers trace applications, providing insights for performance troubleshooting, preventive application and container runtime security enforcement, and much more. The possibilities are endless, and the innovation that eBPF is unlocked has only just begun.

Security
Building on the foundation of seeing and understanding all system calls and combining that with a packet and socket-level view of all networking operations allows for revolutionary new approaches to securing systems. While aspects of system call filtering, network-level filtering, and process context tracing have typically been handled by completely independent systems, eBPF allows for combining the visibility and control of all aspects to create security systems operating on more context with better level of control.
Networking
The combination of programmability and efficiency makes eBPF a natural fit for all packet processing requirements of networking solutions. The programmability of eBPF enables adding additional protocol parsers and easily program any forwarding logic to meet changing requirements without ever leaving the packet processing context of the Linux kernel. The efficiency provided by the JIT compiler provides execution performance close to that of natively compiled in-kernel code.
Tracing & Profiling
The ability to attach eBPF programs to trace points as well as kernel and user application probe points allows unprecedented visibility into the runtime behavior of applications and the system itself. By giving introspection abilities to both the application and system side, both views can be combined, allowing powerful and unique insights to troubleshoot system performance problems. Advanced statistical data structures allow to extract meaningful visibility data in an efficient manner, without requiring the export of vast amounts of sampling data as typically done by similar systems.
Observability & Monitoring
Instead of relying on static counters and gauges exposed by the operating system, eBPF enables the collection & in-kernel aggregation of custom metrics and generation of visibility events based on a wide range of possible sources. This extends the depth of visibility that can be achieved as well as reduces the overall system overhead significantly by only collecting the visibility data required and by generating histograms and similar data structures at the source of the event instead of relying on the export of samples.

Latest Blog Posts

Why eBPF for All Means People Don’t Need to Care about eBPF

November 17, 2022
Community

On the one hand, there are more eBPF-based products and companies than ever before, lighting operations and platform teams abuzz. On the other hand, if you ask the average developer, the term “eBPF” feels foreign and irrelevant to them.

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