Case Study: SmartNews improves Kubernetes performance and scaling with Cilium

SmartNews leverages Cilium to improve performance and scaling

SmartNews, a global news aggregation application, faced significant performance and cost challenges while scaling their Kubernetes platform on AWS. Their initial use of kube-proxy became inefficient and expensive, leading them to seek a solution from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation project Cilium to improve networking and enable cross-cluster communication.

The vendor, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, provided Cilium, which replaced kube-proxy using eBPF technology and its Cluster Mesh feature. This solution resulted in a major performance boost, substantial cost savings by reducing reliance on expensive AWS load balancers, and improved scalability, allowing SmartNews to successfully manage their infrastructure across 39 EKS clusters.

SmartNews

Simon Wu

Software Engineer