Roadmap

This page describes a high-level view of the main priorities for the project, agreed as a result of collaboration between Cilium’s committers and the broader community. You’ll also find here some pointers on how you can influence the roadmap.

Major Feature Status

“Stable” means that the feature is in use in production (though advanced features may still be in beta or in development).

Release Cadence

We aim to make 2-3 point releases per year of Cilium and its core components (Hubble, Cilium CLI etc). We also make patch releases available as necessary for security or urgent fixes.

Focus Areas

For a finer-granularity view, and insight into detailed enhancements and fixes, please refer to issues on GitHub.

Welcoming New Contributors

As a CNCF project we want to make it easier for new contributors to get involved with Cilium. This includes both code and non-code contributions such as documentation, blog posts, example configurations, presentations, training courses, testing and more. Check the Development Guide documentation to understand how to get involved with code contributions, and the Get Involved guide for guidance on contributing blog posts, training and other resources.

CNCF Graduation

Given the widespread adoption of Cilium, CNCF Graduation is a natural goal for the project. We believe that the majority of the criteria are already met, but the following still need to be addressed:

• CII Best Practice Badge

• Third-party security audit

Cilium Service Mesh

Our eBPF-accelerated Service Mesh is the main focus for major enhancement, and it’s a natural evolution of Cilium’s networking capabilities. We released a beta at the end of 2021 and had very valuable feedback from our user community. The next steps we’d like to take for Cilium Service Mesh (in no particular order) are:

• Integration of service mesh branch into mainline Cilium

• Graduating Ingress to stable

  • 100% upstream conformant

  • Visibility via Hubble

  • Support for additional annotations

• Graduating Prometheus metrics and OpenTelemetry collector to stable

• Using Kubernetes as service mesh control plane

  • Simple to use sidecar-free service mesh configured using Kubernetes Services and Ingress with support for additional annotations

• Graduating EnvoyConfig CRD to stable

• Extended sample Grafana dashboards for L7 visibility

• SMI integration

• SPIFFE integration

• Gateway API Integration

• Next-generation mutual authentication datapath framework

  • Support for integrated runtime identity

  • SSL-based mutual authentication

  • Support for any network protocol

• Performance benchmarking

ClusterMesh

Core ClusterMesh is stable and widely adopted. Future extensions include:

• Service affinity

• Cluster health checks

• External Workloads graduating to stable

Advanced Networking Features

There are several advanced networking features currently in beta, several of these are already in production use with a set of adopters. We expect the following features to graduate to stable:

• Transparent Encryption (IPsec & WireGuard)

• BGP

• Bandwidth Manager

• Local Redirect Policy

• CiliumEndpointSlice

• Maglev Consistent Hashing

Hubble Observability

Hubble provides visibility into network flows through the Hubble CLI (stable) and UI (beta), with support for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics. Areas of focus currently include:

• Graduating the Hubble OpenTelemetry collector to stable

• Hubble UI additional features

CI Test Improvements

We have a comprehensive set of tests running in CI, but several contributors are currently working on CI improvements to make these more reliable and easier to maintain. This is a good area to get involved if you are interested in learning more about Cilium internals and development.

Documentation Improvements

We would like to make this Cilium documentation easier to navigate, with more example configurations and links to articles and videos that explain features in more depth.

Influencing the Roadmap

You are welcome to raise feature requests by creating them as GitHub issues. Please search the existing issues to avoid raising duplicates; if you find that someone else is making the same or similar request we encourage the use of GitHub emojis to express your support for an idea!

The most active way to influence the capabilities in Cilium is to get involved in development. We label issues with good-first-issue to help new potential contributors find issues and feature requests that are relatively self-contained and could be a good place to start. Please also read the Development Guide for details of our pull request process and expectations, along with instructions for setting up your development environment. We encourage you to discuss your ideas for significant enhancements and feature requests on the #development channel on Cilium Slack and/or bring them to the Weekly Community Meeting.

This roadmap does not give date commitments since the work is dependent on the community. If you’re looking for commitments to apply engineering resources to work on particular features, one option is to discuss this with the companies who offer commercial distributions of Cilium and may be able to help.

Changes to this Roadmap Page

This roadmap page will be updated through documentation pull requests in the usual way, but the Cilium committers should be consulted beforehand about anything other than trivial fixes.