Cilium Project Journey Report | CNCF

Enroll your company as a CNCF End User and save more than $10K in training and conference costs
Cilium is an open source platform designed for cloud-native networking, security, and observability, leveraging eBPF technology. It provides secure, high-performance network connectivity and deep visibility for Kubernetes and other cloud environments. Cilium allows for complex and detailed network policies, load balancing, service mesh integration, and comprehensive network observability. It is widely used in production environments by companies like Adobe, Capital One, and Google, offering robust support for large-scale deployments.
Cilium joined CNCF on October 13, 2021 and remained in incubation for just under two years before graduating on October 11, 2023. Now, after three years of growth and development, CNCF proudly presents the Cilium project journey report.
In this report, we guide you through the remarkable growth journey Cilium has experienced under CNCF. We can’t attribute every data point to specific inputs, however we can document and explore the correlations in search of successful decisions and actions. This report is part of a series of project journey reports published by the CNCF.
NOTE: These statistics were collected with the DevStats tool, which CNCF built in collaboration with CNCF project communities. “Contributor” is defined as anyone who made a review, comment, commit, or created a PR or issue.
“… Cilium has always been an open source and open governance project. By donating Cilium to the CNCF, we wanted to encourage adoption by a wider community of contributors and end users and really demonstrate that we stand behind it being an open project forever into the future…”
eBPF Community, Isovalent at Cisco and Cilium maintainer
Cilium has been utilized by organizations across the globe, including Adobe, Alibaba, AWS, and Google. Additionally, a varied end-user base relies on Cilium for observability, scaling, and security, such as Digital Ocean, Bloomberg, Alibaba, Post Finance, WSO2, Meltwater, and many others.
“With Cilium, our customers compare us differently with other managed Kubernetes providers now because our performance is much better. Latency is the biggest concern for our customers and Cilium gives us a good advantage there. The performance improvement is one of the biggest advantages that we’ve gotten from Cilium and it is great for our business. Cilium also provides many additional functionalities, like Hubble which gives our customers observability.”
Senior Engineer, Alibaba Cloud
Cilium’s rapid growth and widespread adoption have been fueled by strong collaboration and a unified vision among its key vendor and end-user contributor communities. Founded by Isovalent, the project has expanded to include significant input from more than 1,000 organizations and thousands of independent contributors, all of whom have played a crucial role in shaping it through its user-driven innovation.
The diversity of vendor contributors is expanding; in 2023, Isovalent, by far the largest Cilium contributor, was acquired by Cisco. Other contributors to Cilium include some of the world’s largest tech companies, such as Google, Cisco, and RedHat, as well as fast-growing mid-size enterprises, like Datadog, Cloudflare, and SUSE. Contributions also come from dozens of smaller businesses and innovative startups. Contributing organizations are well distributed between vendors and end users, demonstrating how end users themselves can help foster and sustain fast-growing, successful projects.
The top two contributing companies to Cilium as of the August 2024 reporting date were Isovalent and Google, with 90% and 1% of contributions, respectively. Isovalent and Cisco provided the majority of code contributions to the project in its first two years, with many additional companies joining the community since then. The number of contributing companies has increased by 90% since Cilium joined CNCF, from 533 to 1,011. This growth corresponds to a rise in individual contributors from 1,269 when it joined to 4,464 today, representing a 252% increase.
All time contributions to Cilium total over 506,400, an increase of 124% from 225,900 when it joined CNCF. Isovalent’s percentage of all contributions has decreased slightly, but the company has continued to contribute the lion’s share of code, while Google, Datadog, and Cloudflare have expanded their contributions. These factors indicate a healthy dynamic, where project originators have contributed prolifically while encouraging other organizations to increase their contributions, sharing stewardship, and growing the community.
The diversity of company contributors, and the healthy balance of vendor and end user input, continue to fuel growth and give users confidence in choosing Cilium as their cloud native networking, observability, and security solution.
Contributions by company 2016-07-01 – 2024-04-01
Percentage breakdown of Cilium contributions by company 2016-07-01 – 2024-08-01
Cumulative growth of contributing companies 2016-07-01 – 2024-07-01
Cumulative growth in contributors 2016-07-01 – 2024-07-01
Percentage contributions to Cilium by country 2016-07-01 – 2024-07-01
The importance of velocity is that it allows the CNCF, the Linux Foundation, and other stakeholders to track trends and technologies resonating with developers and end users. By observing the velocity of various projects, we can understand which projects are growing, which are maturing, and which are cultivating large communities. This information can then be used to guide decisions and strategies.
Monthly velocity of Cilium
Based on velocity metrics since joining CNCF, Cilium appears set to continue growing at a robust pace.
One way we track developer velocity (defined by CNCF) is with a simple formula: commits + PRs + issues + authors. We also look at cumulative numbers of contributors throughout Cilium’s history. Both illustrate that Cilium’s formula of multiple vendors