eBPF Foundation recently released its first State of eBPF report which aims to inform technology decision-makers about the technology and some of its use cases. Bill Mulligan, Marketing Committee at the eBPF Foundation, talks about their report and some of the emerging trends coming out of the eBPF ecosystem. He says, “The exciting thing for me monitoring the eBPF landscape is that it’s really growing so fast, because eBPF now has so many applications across the infrastructure stack.”

eBPF technology and its evolution in Linux and Windows

• Mulligan explains that eBPF is a Linux kernel technology that can run sandboxed programs in the Linux kernel to extend or change the functionality of the Linux kernel.
• Whereas eBPF originally started in the Linux kernel, Microsoft is working on porting it to Windows. Mulligan discusses the evolution of eBPF and how work is underway to standardize how the operating system functionality is extended.

eBPF technology and its impact on infrastructure

• eBPF has widespread adoption in computing, with major companies like Facebook, Google, and Netflix using it because of the performance benefits in terms of networking, observability, and tracing.
• Mulligan highlights that eBPF’s purpose was originally around networking but it now covers many different domains and it now has so many applications across the infrastructure stack.

State of eBPF report overview

• Mulligan explains that this is the first time the eBPF Foundation has done the State of eBPF report. The report aims to help technology decision-makers understand why the technology is, its history, use cases, and who is currently using it.
• The mainly qualitative report interviewed people across the industry including members from the eBPF Foundation.

eBPF technology and its applications in modern computing

• eBPF is being used for networking, performance analysis, and security to gain a deeper level of understanding of systems.
• Some of the members of the eBPF Foundation are Cilium (which is being acquired by Cisco), Meta, Intel, Crowdstrike, and Tigera. Mulligan believes that Cisco’s acquisition of Isovalent is positive and will bring more resources to the eBPF community.

eBPF’s potential impact on the networking industry

• Mulligan discusses the State of eBPF report saying it highlights some of the improvements in software that they are seeing with eBPF, like improved scheduling and reduced resource consumption.
• The report also shows the growth they are seeing in the ecosystem with increasingly more open source projects and products.
• One of the notable trends emerging in the eBPF community is the increasing focus on security, with new products and companies forming around using eBPF for security.

Guest: Bill Mulligan (LinkedIn)
Organization: eBPF Foundation (Twitter)

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.