Project Lightning Talk: Translating Ebpf Into Business Value: Lessons From The Cili... Bill Mulligan

In this talk, the speaker discusses the significance of eBPF and Cilium in bridging the gap between software development and business objectives. They emphasize the need to connect the code being written to the actual business outcomes it aims to achieve. Drawing on their experience with Cilium, the speaker outlines a framework that begins with understanding user needs and translating those into specific use cases, such as network policy and multi-cluster networking. Through the example of Bloomberg, the speaker illustrates how Cilium's features enhance security and compliance in the financial services sector. Ultimately, the session highlights how solving practical user problems can lead to significant business outcomes and influence the bottom line.

This is KubeCon number 20 for me, which makes me feel really old. I guess we're over a decade in the cloud native now. And when we were at KubeCon Amsterdam 3 years ago, we were talking about eBPF, Cilium, it's going to be the greatest thing. But a lot of the times when we're talking to people, they say, "Yeah, this bytecode in the kernel, why does it even

matter to my business?" And so, I think a lot of things that we do in software, there's a disconnect between the code that we're writing and the capital that's actually driving the business. So, that's what I'm going to try to talk to you about today. How can we connect the code that we're writing to the actual capital, the business, the bottom line that we're trying to affect?

And when you're thinking about an open source project, you need to think about like what are the hierarchy of needs? Like why is an actual user trying to come to your project and solve their challenges? And in the past 3 years, uh working on the Cilium project, I've kind of come up with a framework of translating from the eBPF bytecode that we have into in Cilium to

the actual business bottom line. And the way that I do that, it all starts with the user, right? That's what we're trying to do with software. We're trying to solve user problems. We want people to use our software. That's the cool thing about open source. You know, eBPF, it's used by every single Android phone in the world. The software that I write is deployed on billions of

devices worldwide. That's pretty cool. That's why I love open source. So, going up from there, connecting it back to the business, what the users are actually trying to solve is a specific use case that they may have in the business. So, whether that's something like multi-cluster networking or network policy or network observability. And they're trying to solve those use cases because their industry has different types of

challenges. And to solve those industry challenges is what their business is trying to do and that's the outcome that they're trying to have. So, let me give you an example from the Cilium project. One of our users is Bloomberg. Um they actually talked at CiliumCon here 3 years ago. And obviously financial services company, what they're trying to do is care about um security and compliance. So, one

of Cilium's features that they have, we have the user Bloomberg, the feature uh that they're trying to use is network policy to secure their Kubernetes clusters. And specifically Cilium has host-based network policies. Now they're able to lock down their clusters in a way that they weren't able to with their networking solutions before. And what does that use case enable them to do? Well, in the financial services

industry, obviously you care about security, compliance, regulation. So, Cilium has other features like encryption, egress gateway, network policy, and these all speak to the challenges that the financial services industry actually has. And bringing that up one more level, they aren't a business isn't trying to solve use cases, what they're actually trying to to have is a business outcome. And the business outcome is something like zero trust

networking, so locking down the network um so that we can do uh do things in a more secure way. Obviously very important for financial services. And at the end of the day, right, we started with the user, they had a specific use case that they were trying to do, which leads us to the industry challenges that they have and the business outcome that they want. And what

does this mean for the business bottom line? Well, in the case of Bloomberg, being able to use host-based network policies with Cilium allowed them to offer new features and new solutions to their customers. So, they were able to unlock new lines of businesses where their existing customers by switching to Cilium as their network networking solution. Right? So, going from the user when you're building an open source

project or business or product or a service, that's what you're trying to do. You're not trying to get a billion downloads. What you're actually trying to do is solve the business challenge that you can actually affect the bottom line. And this is how we did it with Bloomberg and with Cilium. And so, tying this back to the Cilium website, I can walk you really quickly through how

we built out all these things. This is the Cilium homepage. If you go here, we have the users tab. And we have all of our case studies. We have almost 100 public case studies from people all across the industry talking about what they're trying to do and solve with Cilium. Those lead into the different features, the different use cases that we have. So, things like network policy,

egress gateway. That can lead to industry vertical pages. So, here I can't do this without saying AI. So, we have an AI use case. And finally, that leads to the actual outcomes that people are trying to have like zero trust networking. And so, that's how you can go from the user all the way to the business outcome. Thanks for coming and I'll see you at the Cilium

booth.