Keynote: Does eBPF Mean the End of the Sidecar Model? - Liz Rice, Isovalent
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 08/10/2022

Keynote: Does eBPF Mean the End of the Sidecar Model? - Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer, Isovalent

eBPF is a kernel technology that lets us dynamically change the way that the kernel behaves - and it’s revolutionizing cloud native tooling. Tools built with eBPF have the power to observe, secure and connect all the processes on a (virtual) machine. This means there’s no longer a need to inject a container into a pod’s namespace in order to interact with that pod. Could this be the end of the sidecar model that has, until now, been commonly used to instrument cloud native applications?  

This talk clarifies how eBPF makes sidecars unnecessary for many use-cases, and discusses the arguments for and against sidecars in complex abstractions like service mesh.