Since the shift to new application architectures, operations teams have struggled to merge the app modernization movement with traditional infrastructure, including network and security. Enterprises are demanding more effective and lightweight methods of extracting observability data on applications. Against this backdrop, eBPF’s major role in easing that process will revolutionize observability in 2024, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.
Charlotte Dunlap, Research Director, Enterprise Technology and Services at GlobalData, comments: “Observability is useless without the visibility into how new application architectures are performing and impacting underlying systems. Monitoring methods are only achieved through cumbersome coding integrated within applications or cloud workloads, which can heavily impact system performance.
“The little-known technology from eBPF received major buzz in November 2023 during KubeCon and subsequent attention when Cisco announced in December plans to acquire Isovalent, a network software provider whose technology is based on eBPF.’’
The core technology, Berkely Packet Filter (BPF), is actually decades-old, updated ten years ago, helping to address cloud native context higher up the stack. It is only recently that it is finding adoption beyond networking and into security and observability use cases. eBPF (e for extended) significantly simplifies infrastructure engineering requirements and reduces resource usage within Kubernetes environments, while providing deeper insight into app performance across distributed systems and cloud environments.
Dunlap concludes: “DevOps team members will be able to access critical infrastructure features easily, namely operating system kernel-level access for much deeper visibility into system events and processes. eBPF supports the creation of customizable observability solutions to achieve more focused insight into specific systems, resource usage, and data management/analysis. This is conducted in such a way so as to avoid performance interruption.’’
