"Cilium 1.19 has been released, marking ten years of development for the eBPF-based networking and security project. There isn't a flagship feature in this release; instead, it focuses on security hardening, tightening encryption, refining network policy behaviour, and improving scalability for large Kubernetes clusters."
"The 2025 annual Cilium report explains how Cilium has quietly become the dominant CNI in production Kubernetes environments, with over 60 per cent of surveyed deployments using Cilium and more than 75 per cent relying on Cilium-based data planes once managed services such as Azure CNI powered by Cilium and GKE Datapath V2 are included."
"This position is linked in the report to deliberate technical selection rather than platform defaults, with respondents citing performance, eBPF based observability via Hubble, and advanced policy semantics as the main reasons for adoption, which aligns closely with the emphasis in 1.19 on stricter encryption modes, safer cross cluster defaults and deeper traffic tracing."
"Large organisations such as Microsoft, Google and TikTok are described as using Cilium to power some of the largest AI training clusters and IPv6 only data centre deployments, while case studies from firms like ESnet and Nutanix highlight the value of consistent observability and policy controls across heterogeneous environments."
Cilium 1.19 represents a milestone release after ten years of development, featuring over 2,900 commits from 1,000+ developers. Rather than introducing flagship features, this release emphasizes security hardening, encryption tightening, network policy refinement, and improved scalability for large Kubernetes clusters. The 2025 annual Cilium report reveals that Cilium has become the dominant CNI in production Kubernetes environments, with over 60 percent of surveyed deployments using Cilium directly, and over 75 percent relying on Cilium-based data planes when including managed services. Organizations adopt Cilium primarily for performance, eBPF-based observability through Hubble, and advanced policy semantics. Cilium now ranks as the second largest CNCF project by contributions after Kubernetes, with stabilized contribution levels around 10,000 pull requests annually. The project is expanding into new domains including AI workloads and unified networking across Kubernetes and virtual machines, with major organizations like Microsoft, Google, and TikTok utilizing Cilium for large-scale deployments.
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