Top all-time · #2849
Isovalent
Company blog · isovalent.com/blogsystemssecurityprogramming
Isovalent is the company blog at isovalent.com, writing about systems, security and programming. Since 2020, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 35 times, most often “Cilium netkit: The Final Frontier in Container Networking Performance”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers mostly link Isovalent's blog as a reference for eBPF, Cilium, Tetragon and netkit, and to its whitepapers and the Learning eBPF report. Comments cite it as a source rather than praising the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Isovalent delivers Cilium-based, eBPF-powered solutions for secure, observable, and scalable Kubernetes networking, trusted by top enterprises.
Most-linked posts?
- Cilium netkit: The Final Frontier in Container Networking Performance4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-01-30
- Tetragon – eBPF-Based Security Observability and Runtime Enforcement3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-05-16
- eBPF: Yes, It's Turing Complete2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-09-12
- Next-Generation Mutual Authentication with Cilium Service Mesh2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-05-05
- Learning eBPF – Book available for download from O'Reilly2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-03-22
- Demystifying the [Kubernetes] CNI by Writing One from Scratch2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-17
What Hacker News says?
Isovalent | Multiple roles | Mountain View (US), Zürich (CH), or Remote We're the company behind the open source Cilium project ( https://cilium.io ) (11K stars on GitHub) providing eBPF-based networking, observability, and security for container workloads and clusters. We have an amazing and in-demand product using revolutionary technology and are looking for top talent to help us build and explore all of its possi…
Comment linking /careers
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2022)”Submitted eBPF will help solve service mesh by getting rid of sidecars as a story · 237 points
HN discussionI'm not going to spam this forum with a marketing pitch so I'll just refer to https://www.isovalent.com/product and add that you can buy a Cilium Enterprise distribution with enterprise specific add-ons from us.
Comment linking /product
on “eBPF – The Future of Networking and Security”Submitted Cisco to acquire Isovalent as a story · 142 points
HN discussionThis article from isovalent introducing netkit walks through the benefits and tradeoffs https://isovalent.com/blog/post/cilium-netkit-a-new-containe...
Comment linking /blog/post/cilium-netkit-a-new-container-networking-paradigm-for-the-ai-era/
on “Case Study: ByteDance Uses eBPF to Enhance Networking Performance”Submitted Cilium reduced p99 latency by 4x implementing bandwidth manager as a story · 19 points
HN discussionCilium (a Kubernetes CNI) can use netkit instead of veth bridges since netkit was introduced in the kernel https://isovalent.com/blog/post/cilium-netkit-a-new-containe...
Comment linking /blog/post/cilium-netkit-a-new-container-networking-paradigm-for-the-ai-era/
on “Case Study: ByteDance Uses eBPF to Enhance Networking Performance”Submitted Microsoft and Grafana Labs invest $40M in Isovalent as a story · 12 points
HN discussionAlso commonly used for high-performance networking and security use cases, for example https://isovalent.com/blog/post/cilium-netkit-a-new-containe... . Basically anywhere you'd previously need to write a kernel module but now can have user space run arbitrary kernel code that's secure and won't crash the kernel. You can also now write custom schedulers in eBPF with sched_ext.
Comment linking /blog/post/cilium-netkit-a-new-container-networking-paradigm-for-the-ai-era/
on “Show HN: Coroot – eBPF-based, open source observability with actionable insights”Submitted Next-Generation Mutual Authentication with Cilium Service Mesh as a story · 11 points
HN discussionIIRC systemd uses eBPF for some of its sandboxing/security features, so probably some of your services would be more vulnerable to exploits. There are other tools that use eBPF to mitigate specific Linux kernel vulnerabilities, or to do Linux kernel observation/tracing. https://isovalent.com/blog/post/2022-05-16-tetragon/
Comment linking /blog/post/2022-05-16-tetragon/
on “When eBPF meets TLS. Defeating TLS encryption with eBPF tricks [pdf]”Submitted Launching eBPF Foundation as Part of the Linux Foundation as a story · 9 points
HN discussionFor getting started with eBPF performance mindset, I normally recommend Brendan Gregg's book just to see what's possible: - https://www.brendangregg.com/bpf-performance-tools-book.html And as a related activity, you could just install the bcc-tools package (on RHEL clones) and check out the /usr/share/bcc/tools directory to see what's already implemented (on latest Ubuntu, these tools seem to be installed in /usr/sb…
Comment linking /books/learning-ebpf/
on “When eBPF pt_regs reads return garbage on the latest Linux kernels, blame Fred”Submitted Tetragon – eBPF-Based Security Observability and Runtime Enforcement as a story · 7 points
HN discussionand also a whitepaper / report from Isovalent on the same topic https://isovalent.com/blog/post/2022-04-oreilly-security can be downloaded for free (after filling the form), or if you have access to O'Reilly's Safari library, it is https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/security-observabi... there.
Comment linking /blog/post/2022-04-oreilly-security
on “Tetragon: eBPF-Based Security Observability and Runtime Enforcement”Submitted Tetragon – eBPF-Based Security Observability and Runtime Enforcement as a story · 6 points
HN discussionthere is also a post announcing it https://isovalent.com/blog/post/2022-05-16-tetragon
Comment linking /blog/post/2022-05-16-tetragon
on “Tetragon: eBPF-Based Security Observability and Runtime Enforcement”Submitted Container Security book by Liz Rice (2nd edition, free download) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI still think of eBPF as not being Turing-complete. There is still a complexity limit in the verifier. Even if someone did implement Game of Life by having the program set a timer to run itself. https://isovalent.com/blog/post/ebpf-yes-its-turing-complete...
Comment linking /blog/post/ebpf-yes-its-turing-complete/
on “Caddy compatibility for zeroserve: 3x throughput and 70% lower latency”Submitted Demystifying the [Kubernetes] CNI by Writing One from Scratch as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think (not 100% sure) Cillium [0][1] kinda already does this. This loophole is good for packet processing/routing and even introducing XDP based ACL to bypass any ip/nf tables and get that almost wire speed benefit. I use Cilium with these features for custom made k8s clusters with Talos OS without any kube-proxy. [0] https://docs.cilium.io/en/stable/operations/performance/tuni... [1] https://isovalent.com/blog/po…
Comment linking /blog/post/cilium-netkit-a-new-container-networking-paradigm-for-the-ai-era
on “Show HN: Spliff – Correlating XDP and TLS via eBPF (Building a Linux EDR)”Submitted Demystifying the [Kubernetes] CNI by Writing One from Scratch as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe whole BPF verifier and development process is so botched, it's ridiculous. It's like maintainers decided to make this as hard as possible out of pettiness and "they have to use C APIs instead" or something. - Loading an eBPF module without the CAP_BPF (and in some cases without the CAP_NET_ADMIN which you need for XDP) capabilities will generate a "unknown/invalid memory access" error which is super useless as a…
Comment linking /learning-ebpf/
on “eBPF Verification Is Untenable”Submitted Cilium netkit: The Final Frontier in Container Networking Performance as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's actually answered (indirectly) on that page: "My report "What is eBPF?" and in-depth book "Learning eBPF" are both available for download [0] from Isovalent or with your subscription to O'Reilly's learning platform. You can buy "Learning eBPF" from any good bookstore (support your local bookshop by ordering it there!)" IIUC, you need to give contact info on that page to get the PDF. So this [1] might be a bette…
Comment linking /ebpf/
on “The Beginner's Guide to eBPF”Submitted eBPF: Yes, It's Turing Complete as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Cilium Mesh – One Mesh to Connect Them All as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Facebook, Google, Isovalent, Microsoft, and Netflix Announce eBPF Foundation as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Cilium Up and Running book released (including free eBook) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Networking and eBPF Predictions for 2026 and Beyond as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
