Cilium, a CNCF incubating project, has announced the general availability of Cilium 1.12. With the release, Cilium has introduced Cilium Service Mesh, a major new open source entrant into the service mesh category, and the first service mesh that gives enterprises the flexibility to run service mesh in a sidecar model or a sidecar-less model and with a broad choice of different control planes.

In addition, this release has also introduced a fully compliant Kubernetes Ingress controller directly integrated into Cilium.

The vision for Cilium Service Mesh is a service mesh built using native Kubernetes resources, just like Cilium’s ClusterMesh uses Kubernetes Services and NetworkPolicy to perform multi-cluster connectivity. Cilium Service Mesh also introduces CiliumEnvoyConfig (CEC), its low level abstraction for programming Envoy proxies directly with a new Kubernetes Custom Resource (CRD) for advanced L7 use cases to make the full feature set of Envoy available to all users.

Cilium is well known as the de-facto standard for cloud native networking and security, adopted by companies like Adobe, Bell Canada, and IKEA as well as many managed Kubernetes platforms including products from Google Cloud and AWS.