Cilium, an open source software for providing, securing, and observing network connectivity between container workloads, has seen massive growth in both contribution and adoption over the past year. According to the 2022 Cilium Annual Report, Cilium has gone from a few stories to full blown production everywhere in 2022.

The 2022 report covers a wide range of topics, including contributor growth, release highlights, results from the Cilium User Survey, where Cilium is in production, community quotes and engagement, events from the year, and where the project is heading in 2023.

Cilium 1.12 was released in July and made many improvements across networking, security, and service mesh. The 1.13 release is imminent, with release candidate 4 already in preview. Cilium now provides a fully conformant implementation of Kubernetes Ingress to provide features such as path-based routing, TLS termination, or sharing a single load-balancer IP for many services.

The highlight of the report is how it showcases that end users across diverse industries like finance, retail, software, and telecommunications are all realizing the benefits of Cilium and eBPF and have shown that it is production ready at scale.

According to Thomas Graf, Co-Creator of Cilium Project, “With Kubernetes finally reaching large scale and widespread adoption, the strengths of Cilium are truly beginning to show. 2022 was the year where Cilium became the de-facto standard CNI. All major cloud providers and many of the most popular Kubernetes distributions are using Cilium. This standardization on Cilium is bringing the benefits of eBPF everywhere, giving companies a consistent connectivity experience wherever they need to deploy Kubernetes, in or across clouds, on-prem, or even on a ship.”

If 2022 has been the year of Cilium as the CNI, Graf has three predictions for 2023: service mesh maturity, ecosystem expansion, and increased software supply chain security. Finally, as a milestone, Cilium is also expected to graduate from the CNCF.