Case Study: Datadog scales secure multi-cloud networking with Cilium and eBPF

How Datadog uses Cilium & eBPF to power their data plane

Datadog, a SaaS monitoring and security platform, faced significant infrastructure scaling challenges while running tens of Kubernetes clusters with over 10,000 nodes across multiple clouds. Their initial networking tools, including iptables, IPVS, and cloud-specific CNIs, were not designed for their scale. These solutions caused performance issues with load balancing, were difficult to manage and debug, and lacked the streamlined network policies and traffic encryption required for operation in regulated environments.

The vendor, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (via its Cilium project), provided the solution. Datadog implemented Cilium as their default CNI and kube-proxy replacement, leveraging eBPF technology to create a consistent and high-performance data plane. This allowed them to efficiently enforce network policies for security and compliance, abstract away cloud-provider differences, and dramatically improve scalability. As a result, Datadog can now process over 10 trillion data points per day for more than 18,500 customers.

Datadog

Laurent Bernaille

Staff Engineer