Cilium

Answer-first: API Gateways govern north-south ingress traffic crossing untrusted perimeter boundaries, executing edge authentication, rate limiting, and protocol translation. Conversely, Service Meshes manage east-west internal pod-to-pod communication, enforcing mutual TLS zero-trust identity, distributed telemetry, and traffic shifting. Rather than competing alternatives, modern architectures deploy both symbiotically, with eBPF sockops bypassing kernel TCP stacks to eliminate sidecar proxy latency. Prerequisite: In-depth knowledge of OSI Layer 4/Layer 7 networking, Kubernetes Ingress and Gateway API specifications, Envoy proxy architecture, and mutual TLS fundamentals is required for this chapter. ...

📖 Series Navigation: ← Previous Chapter: Part 9 — Cookie vs. SessionStorage vs. LocalStorage | Series Hub Part 10: Envoy Gateway vs. Cilium eBPF Service Mesh: Kernel Performance & Layer 7 Governance Showdown Answer-first: Envoy Gateway excels as a North-South Edge API Gateway with dedicated Envoy pods for advanced L7 policies (WAF, JWT, rate limiting, AI token quotas). Cilium eBPF dominates East-West cluster networking by bypassing the TCP/IP stack via sockops and cutting 92% RAM with node-level Envoy daemons. The 2026 standard combines both. ...

Production-grade Kubernetes Operator and eBPF kernel observability guide using Kubebuilder v4 and cilium/ebpf. Features C eBPF kernel probes (sys_execve, tcp_connect), zero-copy BPF ringbuffers (BPF_MAP_TYPE_RINGBUF), CRD controllers with status subresources, and deployment without privileged mode.