“Are These Things Talking to Each Other?” - Observing Kubernetes Networking... - Anna Kapuścińska
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 28/10/2022

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“Are These Things Talking to Each Other?” - Observing Kubernetes Networking with Cilium, Hubble and Grafana - Anna Kapuścińska, Isovalent

“Are they even talking to each other”? - asked almost every engineer on the planet when debugging their system. Although the question is being asked forever, the answer isn’t always easy. As the complexity of our systems grows, networking becomes more and more a magic glue: it's hard to understand and even harder to debug. Good observability helps in both understanding and debugging what happens. Nowadays more and more people are looking into eBPF as a solution for networking and observability. That’s what the Cilium project provides: eBPF-based networking, with a visibility layer - Hubble. At the same time, observability in the cloud native world is commonly achieved with Prometheus and Grafana dashboards. We will connect these technologies. Using Hubble metrics, we will visualize how applications talk to each other in a Kubernetes environment, famous for its complex networking. In a real-world scenario, we will discover a mysterious communication problem. It won’t scare us though. Equipped with open source tools, we will quickly debug the system and uncover the underlying issue.