Today, we are celebrating a major milestone for the company and the Cilium project ecosystem as Cisco announces the intent to acquire Isovalent. When we started our journey seven years ago, writing the first few lines of Cilium source code, we couldn’t imagine in our wildest dreams what Cilium would become. We founded Isovalent a year after starting the project, embarking on the mission of bringing the exciting eBPF technology to everyone by redefining what is possible in networking and security for the cloud native age with Cilium. While we evolved our technology and company, and built a thriving open source community, we hired a mind-blowingly talented team of amazing people and focused on building technology and products loved by customers. As we celebrate this major milestone for the team, we want to look back, but also look forward to see the exciting future ahead for Isovalent and Cisco.

Isovalent Office, Cupertino

In the last seven years, we have invested all our passion and heart into the open source projects Cilium, Tetragon, Hubble, and eBPF. We donated the Cilium project ecosystem to the CNCF and, together with your help as a community, have developed and matured it to the point of Cilium becoming a graduated CNCF project among the ranks of Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. As a Cilium community we have developed what has become the standard for cloud native networking and security, deployed into many Kubernetes distributions you are running today.

From left to Right: Batman visits the Cilium booth, early Cilium presentation at ioVisor Summit, OG Sunnyvale office with bananas, team lunch with happy Michi

As initial talks with Cisco sparked, we didn’t have to ask what a potential acquisition would mean for Cilium, Tetragon, and our other projects. It was clear from the beginning that Cisco came to the table with a clear vision to double down on our products and our open source strategy with a strong commitment to our open source projects. Open source has become the way to standardize technology and cloud native infrastructure is no exception.

Open Source projects created by or heavily contributed to by Isovalent

As Cilium and Tetragon evolved, we also launched Isovalent Enterprise – the leading enterprise distribution of Cilium and Tetragon. As we join Cisco, we are excited to continue developing and enhancing Isovalent Enterprise and working with all of you.

There are countless other milestones that we have achieved over the years as Isovalent. With Cilium, we built a technology that all three major public cloud providers have selected for their managed Kubernetes offerings. Countless enterprises around the globe have adopted our products. Large-scale Kubernetes users like Datadog, ByteDance, and Sky bet on Cilium. Customers such as GitHub, G-Research, and Nationwide are securing their highly sensitive infrastructure with Tetragon.

eBPF Documentary & Isovalent at KubeCon Chicago 2023

We helped create a foundation around eBPF and became “movie stars” by collaborating on a fantastic documentary on eBPF together with many of our friends in the eBPF community. We raised money from investors such as a16z, an investor most founders only dream about. We spoke at countless KubeCons and are looking forward to continuing enjoying all the interactions and hallway conversations with all of you. But these milestones have little meaning compared to what we are most proud of: the incredible team and amazing culture we managed to build. Dan and I couldn’t be happier with or more proud of the team we are taking this next step with.

❤️ Team Isovalent

We not only got really good at innovating, building communities, and selling together, we also explore the world, have great food, make friends, and have fun on every occasion we can find. As we join Cisco as a team, we look forward to bringing along the Isovalent culture and spirit, and welcoming more of you as we continue our journey.

As we learned more about Cisco’s strategy and plan, we got more and more excited about the joint vision of continuing to build out our amazing team around eBPF, Cilium, and our open source projects while also accelerating the product side and bringing cloud native excellence to customers with products they love. We are excited about this shared vision and what is ahead for Cilium and Tetragon, and we look forward to continuing our eBPF journey as part of Cisco to bring our technology and products to an even larger customer base.

We are taking a moment to appreciate what we have achieved as a team, and we thank all of you in the community and all our customers and partners for helping us get where we are today.

🫶 Thomas, Dan, and the Isovalent Team

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