Cilium 1.18 brings major enhancements across security, performance, and operational flexibility. This release introduces a more secure encrypted overlay with IPsec, enhanced IPv6 support and further improvements to load balancing, Gateway API, and IP address management ; reinforcing Cilium’s role as the foundation for modern Kubernetes networking.

Isovalent

Cilium 1.18 introduces significant networking and security enhancements including encrypted overlay with IPsec protection for tunnel metadata, ingress bandwidth controls for pods, expanded IPv6 support across encapsulation modes and kube-proxy replacement, BGP route aggregation, Gateway API v1.3 support, and performance improvements showing up to 40% reduction in policy latency and 43% lower CPU usage during service churn in 1,000-node clusters.

Cilium 1.18 - Expanded IPv6 Support, Encrypted Overlay, Ingress Bandwidth Controls, Policy Performance Improvements, and More!