Cilium became the default CNI on major managed platforms for a reason that is mechanical rather than fashionable. The iptables datapath degrades with service count, and eBPF replaces a linear scan with a map lookup.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in researched DevOps, SRE and platform engineering interview loops, written to a senior-engineer editorial bar, and never padded to hit a word count.
Cilium became the default CNI on major managed platforms for a reason that is mechanical rather than fashionable. The iptables datapath degrades with service count, and eBPF replaces a linear scan with a map lookup.
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