Why eBPF Is the Secret Weapon Behind Modern Cloud‑Native Platforms

1. What is eBPF?

Gartner predicts that by 2025 more than 95% of digital workloads will run on cloud‑native platforms, with Kubernetes becoming the standard for cross‑cloud orchestration. In this shift, eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) plays a crucial role.

Operating systems are divided into user space and kernel space. The kernel, as the core of the OS, has privileged access to protected memory and hardware devices, and modern OSes enforce that user processes cannot directly manipulate the kernel.

Applications run in user space and must request privileged kernel services for hardware interaction, file I/O, network packets, or memory access.

eBPF enables applications to run code inside the kernel without modifying kernel source code. eBPF programs are portable across kernel versions, can be automatically updated, and are verified at load time to prevent crashes or instability.

eBPF is an abstract virtual machine with its own instruction set that runs in Linux and Windows kernels. It executes user‑defined programs in a sandbox, triggered by kernel events and receiving pointers to kernel or user‑space memory.

2. Why eBPF?

The eBPF project layout consists of three key components (see Figure 1):

eBPF program that runs in the kernel and reacts to events.

User‑space program that loads the eBPF program into the kernel and interacts with it.

BPF Maps (hash maps, arrays, ring/perf buffers) that allow data storage and information sharing between user‑space programs and kernel eBPF programs.

During development, eBPF bytecode is injected into the kernel (Figure 1).

In the runtime phase, a Go library uses eBPF system calls to load the program into the kernel. The kernel validates the code, the JIT compiler compiles it, and attaches it to the required hooks (system calls, function entry/exit, kernel tracepoints, network events). eBPF programs provide visibility between kernel and user space.

eBPF programs use BPF Maps to share collected information and maintain state, accessible via system calls from both kernel and user‑space.

Various hook points trigger eBPF programs, such as:

Express Data Path (XDP): the earliest point in the network driver where an eBPF program can be attached and triggered on packet receipt.

Traffic control ingress/egress: similar to XDP but attached after the network stack’s initial processing.

Socket operations: eBPF programs attached to specific cgroups and triggered by TCP events.

Socket send/receive: hooks that fire on each send operation of a TCP socket.

Kernel functions can be probed with Kprobes and user‑space functions with Uprobes; Linux Security Module (LSM) hooks (kernel 5.7+) enable security‑related actions.

3. Why use eBPF now?

eBPF’s market potential is reflected in major 2022 acquisitions: New Relic bought Pixie Labs, and Datadog acquired Seekret to leverage eBPF expertise for new features.

Seekret uses eBPF to automatically discover and visualize API assets, interconnections, and dependencies, helping developers and product owners understand API behavior in dynamic environments.

Increasing industry understanding of eBPF creates more buyers. eBPF is now mature, available on Windows, and supported by toolchains such as GCC, Aya, and a Rust library for writing eBPF programs.

4. How to commercialize eBPF?

A possible business model offers subscription access to software, with product‑based pricing tied to specific use cases (network observability, runtime security, etc.) and data‑source plans, as illustrated in Figure 7. Pricing can consider the number of user accounts, support level, and usage‑based fees for data transferred beyond free quotas.

Data‑source plans are linked to usage‑based pricing: data reported to the eBPF agent is processed and converted according to source‑specific rules, with charges for bytes exceeding the monthly free allowance.

Alternatively, resource‑based pricing can be based on the number of deployed controllers and agents (daemons) and the type of support provided.

5. Summary

eBPF is to the kernel what JavaScript is to the web browser: a powerful, programmable layer that, despite challenges such as rapid development cycles, kernel‑version differences, and lack of simple packaging, drives major innovation in the kernel space. Its dynamic programmability, reliability, and minimal‑interruption visibility enable high‑efficiency observability, security forensics, load balancing, routing, and service‑mesh capabilities, making it a cornerstone of modern cloud‑native architectures.