Understanding Cilium Series (1): Introduction to Cilium
Understanding Cilium Series (1): Introduction to Cilium Current status of k8s Service load balancing implementations Before Cilium, Services were implemented by kube-proxy in three modes: userspace, iptables, and ipvs.
Userspace In this mode, kube-proxy acts as a reverse proxy and listens on random ports. It redirects traffic to the proxy port via iptables rules, and kube-proxy forwards the traffic to backend pods. Service requests go from user space into kernel iptables and then back to user space, which is costly and has poor performance.