Cilium

A CNI is picked once and rarely revisited, and there is no organized data on what it consumes day to day. Measuring 5 CNIs in 14 configurations under identical conditions showed an 8x memory spread, eBPF map memory that shows up in different metrics depending on the CNI, and a 70% kube-proxy memory saving from the nftables mode that had not been published as a number.

We rebuilt last year’s Gateway API PoC from the scoring model up and re-measured 7 implementations. All 7 pass official conformance, but the features you can actually use range from 6 to 13.

100-round PoC results and selection guide for 7 Kubernetes Gateway API implementations across 17 test scenarios