Case Study: Ascend achieves secure, consistent networking and faster debugging with Cilium from CNCF

How Ascend leverages Cilium as a networking layer

Ascend, a data automation platform, required a consistent and secure networking layer for its high-volume, short-lived workloads across diverse customer environments, including on-premise and multiple clouds. Their challenge involved handling significant IP churn, ensuring data security, and simplifying complex network integrations. To solve this, they turned to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, Cilium.

By implementing Cilium as their CNI, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation provided Ascend with a unified networking solution. This eliminated their IP churn issues by reducing required IPs by 256x, provided reliable encryption for data in transit, and offered powerful network policy tools. The measurable impact was dramatic: debugging time for networking issues dropped from up to 16 hours to just 20 seconds, while overall compute requirements were lowered due to higher pod density.

Ascend