Uploaded June 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
eBPF has emerged over the past decade as one of the key technologies enabling innovation in the data center. From providing drastic performance efficiency boosts in load balancing, providing a space for experimentation with new protocols, to instrumenting the operations for better monitoring and scheduling, eBPF has provided a path for systems software to be safely and efficiently tailored to the demands of cloud computing. But how exactly does eBPF work, and what makes it suitable for solving these problems? This talk will take a look back at the progression of eBPF to provide insights about how this technology has changed networking in the data center. We'll discuss open source solutions like Katran and Cilium and their impact on both non-Kubernetes and Kubernetes environments, explore how technologies like XDP (eXpress Data Path) and Netkit have accelerated host networking, and ponder how the eBPF ecosystem will unlock the next generation of innovation.
Joe Stringer: Joe is a Principal Software Engineer at Isovalent with over a decade of experience building efficient software networks. As a contributor to open source projects ranging from Open vSwitch to Cilium and the Linux kernel, Joe has built critical components to enforce stateful security policies across both cloud and on-premises environments. Joe serves as a Co-Maintainer for the Cilium project, and as a member of the eBPF Foundation Steering Committee. In his spare time, Joe enjoys travel, cycling, music and gaming.
Speaker Joe Stringer - Isovalent at Cisco
eBPF has emerged over the past decade as one of the key technologies enabling innovation in the data center. From providing drastic performance efficiency boosts in load balancing, providing a space for experimentation with new protocols, to instrumenting the operations for better monitoring and scheduling, eBPF has provided a path for systems software to be safely and efficiently tailored to the demands of cloud computing. But how exactly does eBPF work, and what makes it suitable for solving these problems? This talk will take a look back at the progression of eBPF to provide insights about how this technology has changed networking in the data center. We'll discuss open source solutions like Katran and Cilium and their impact on both non-Kubernetes and Kubernetes environments, explore how technologies like XDP (eXpress Data Path) and Netkit have accelerated host networking, and ponder how the eBPF ecosystem will unlock the next generation of innovation.
Joe Stringer: Joe is a Principal Software Engineer at Isovalent with over a decade of experience building efficient software networks. As a contributor to open source projects ranging from Open vSwitch to Cilium and the Linux kernel, Joe has built critical components to enforce stateful security policies across both cloud and on-premises environments. Joe serves as a Co-Maintainer for the Cilium project, and as a member of the eBPF Foundation Steering Committee. In his spare time, Joe enjoys travel, cycling, music and gaming.
Speaker Joe Stringer - Isovalent at Cisco
