Case Study: PostFinance achieves scalable, observable Kubernetes networking with Isovalent Cilium Enterprise

PostFinance picks Isovalent Cilium Enterprise for Cloud Native Networking

PostFinance, one of Switzerland’s leading financial institutions, needed a more scalable and observable networking setup as it expanded to around 70 microservice-based applications across 19 on-premises Kubernetes clusters. Using traditional iptables-based CNI plugins made networking insight difficult and introduced latency and consistency issues. PostFinance turned to Isovalent and its Cilium Enterprise platform to address these cloud native networking challenges.

With Isovalent Cilium Enterprise, PostFinance replaced its previous CNI and enabled kube-proxy replacement to improve scale, observability, and latency. The results were significant: pod-to-service connection startup dropped from up to 12 seconds to 12 milliseconds, and pod-to-IP connections improved from 60 seconds to 5 milliseconds, while outgoing connections improved from 75 milliseconds to 48 milliseconds. PostFinance also gained better troubleshooting, security visibility, traffic encryption, and a simpler Kubernetes setup.

PostFinance

Clément Nussbaumer

Systems Engineer