Platform teams managing large Kubernetes fleets face configuration drift and inconsistency across clusters. k0rdent provides a declarative control plane for provisioning and templating cluster fleets, while Cilium (built on eBPF) delivers CNI networking, identity-based security, and L7 observability via Hubble. Together, they let teams bake networking and policy into the cluster definition itself rather than adding them post-deployment. The walkthrough demonstrates deploying a bare-metal cluster via k0rdent's remote-cluster ClusterTemplate with Cilium as the CNI, then applying a CiliumNetworkPolicy that enforces Layer 7 HTTP rules — blocking access to a /private endpoint while allowing /public — without any service mesh or sidecar required.
