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Cilium Service Mesh replaces Istio or Linkerd sidecars with eBPF in the kernel: it handles policy, WireGuard encryption, and Hubble observability without a per-pod proxy, cutting memory overhead from roughly 100 GB to about 5 GB in a 100-node cluster. It suits large clusters with teams comfortable with eBPF.
A service mesh adds mTLS, uniform observability, and traffic management between microservices without modifying application code. The ecosystem has consolidated: Istio is the most complete and complex, Linkerd prioritises simplicity with Rust proxies, and Cilium delivers sidecarless service mesh via eBPF.
Cilium replaces iptables with eBPF programs loaded directly into the Linux kernel, substituting O(n) linear chains with O(1) hash lookups. Documented benchmarks show up to 50% lower p95 latency, 2-3x more throughput, and 70% less kernel CPU in large Kubernetes clusters.
