Introduction to Cilium (LFS146)

This course is designed for application developers, systems operators, and security professionals with an interest in learning how to use Cilium to better connect, observe, and secure Kubernetes. Learners should be familiar with basic Kubernetes concepts, Kubernetes operations and the kubectl tool.

The course teaches the basics of Cilium and how it is used to connect, observe, and secure Kubernetes clusters, starting with the container networking challenges motivating the creation of Cilium, followed by the Cilium architecture and how it uses eBPF to address those challenges. The course also provides a step-by-step guide for installing and setting up Cilium as your CNI is included, enabling you to learn how to configure network policies to secure a network and how to use Hubble to observe network flows. Finally, the course provides hands-on experience using some of Cilium’s most popular features, such as support for L7 protocol-aware network policies, transparent encryption, and cluster mesh networking. By the end of this course, you will understand how Cilium and Hubble work and how they can be used to connect, observe, and secure your cloud native environments.

Upon completion, you will be able to install and use Cilium to better connect, observe and secure your Kubernetes applications. Cluster administrators will be able to confidently install Cilium on a single cluster or in a cluster mesh configuration and to replace kube-proxy for more efficient, scalable networking. Cluster users will be able to use Hubble to observe network activity and then craft L3-L7 network policy to better secure their applications.