Cilium 1.20 is a major release expanding Gateway API support from v1.4 to v1.6, adding ExternalAuth filters for pre-request authentication, TCPRoute/UDPRoute for non-HTTP traffic management, and ListenerSets for multi-tenant gateway delegation. Networking improvements include ENI IPAM with IPv6 support on AWS (beta), automatic netkit/veth datapath selection for mixed kernel fleets, and a new datapath plugin system allowing cloud providers to extend Cilium's eBPF datapath without forking. Security enhancements include ztunnel sidecarless mTLS via HBONE tunnels, Kubernetes ClusterNetworkPolicy support, and a new cluster-mesh policy entity. Operational improvements include an 80% reduction in the cilium-cni binary size (76 MB to 16 MB), stable MCS-API support for cross-cluster service discovery, topology-aware traffic distribution with PreferSameZone/PreferSameNode, and BPF policy-map aggregation for world/remote-node identities to reduce map pressure at scale.
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Highlights at a glanceNetworkingGateway APISecurityDay 2 Operations & ScaleConclusion12.3K Impressions1 Comment