> KUBERNETES
Cilium eBPF Hybrid Service Mesh & Private Cloud Topology
High-performance container networking using Cilium eBPF without kube-proxy, eliminating iptables overhead and routing traffic locally to avoid AZ transit tolls.
Mathematical Breakeven Inflection Curve
Reduces network spend by 40% - 70% in high-volume microservice topologies (> 50 TB/mo internal east-west traffic).
3 Maturity Tiers & Infrastructure Specifications
Component stack and cost steps from prototype to hyper-scale enterprise
1. Prototype / Early Stage15 - 50 pods
$280 - $750 / mo
$0.008 / GB east-west traffic
Stack Components:
- Kubernetes Cluster
- Cilium CNI (kube-proxy replacement)
- Envoy Gateway
Cost Allocation:Cilium Network Flow Metadata
Autoscaling:Karpenter Autoscaler
2. Scaled Production100 - 500 pods
$1,200 - $4,800 / mo
$0.003 / GB east-west traffic
Stack Components:
- Kubernetes Multi-AZ
- Cilium ClusterMesh
- Cilium Hubble Observability
- Local AZ Read Caching
Cost Allocation:Cilium Hubble Network Cost Allocation
Autoscaling:Karpenter with AZ-Aware Placement
3. High-Throughput Enterprise1,000 - 10,000 pods
$4,800 - $28,000 / mo
$0.001 / GB east-west traffic
Stack Components:
- Hybrid Kubernetes (AWS + Bare-Metal Hetzner)
- Cilium Multi-Cluster WireGuard Mesh
- BGP Peering
Cost Allocation:FOCUS Network Cost Allocation by Service Pair
Autoscaling:Predictive Horizontal Workload Autoscaler
Key Cost Drivers
- •Node compute instances running eBPF kernel
- •Inter-cluster encrypted VPN/WireGuard bandwidth
- •Observability metrics storage
Waste Vulnerabilities
- •WST-NET-02: Microservices communicating cross-AZ without locality affinity
- •Unmonitored chatty gRPC service loops
Mitigation Playbooks
- •Configure Cilium Topology Aware Routing
- •Implement Hubble network metrics alerting on cross-AZ bytes