Announcing expanded support for Cilium with Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes

Today, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) expands support for Cilium as the Container Networking Interface (CNI) for Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes. Cilium is a Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) graduated project that provides core networking capabilities for Kubernetes workloads. Now, you can receive support from AWS for a broader set of Cilium features when using Cilium with Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes including application ingress, in-cluster load balancing, Kubernetes network policies, and kube-proxy replacement mode.

Kubernetes clusters require a CNI for connectivity between pods running in the cluster, but most Kubernetes applications require additional components, such as ingress controllers and load balancers, to serve and secure network traffic with other external systems or users. These additional capabilities are integrated features of Cilium, built on Cilium’s eBPF-powered networking and security. Now, Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes users can receive support from AWS for Cilium’s Ingress and Gateway features, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Control Plane, Load Balancer IP Address Management (LB IPAM), kube-proxy replacement, and Kubernetes network policies.

AWS supports the Amazon VPC CNI for Amazon EKS nodes in AWS Cloud, which is optimized for Amazon VPC networking with built-in features such as enhanced subnet discovery, Kubernetes network policies, and multiple network interfaces per pod. Cilium support for Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes is available. To learn more about Cilium support for Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes, see Configure CNI for hybrid nodes in the Amazon EKS User Guide.