Blog Post

Azure Networking Blog
4 MIN READ

Introducing eBPF Host Routing: High performance AI networking with Azure CNI powered by Cilium

Sam_Foo's avatar
Sam_Foo
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Nov 08, 2025
AI-driven applications demand low-latency workloads for optimal user experience. To meet this need, services are moving to containerized environments, with Kubernetes as the standard. Kubernetes netw...
Updated Nov 08, 2025
Version 2.0
azure networking
cilium
container networking
ebpf
open-source
alucas1665's avatar
alucas1665
Copper Contributor
Dec 05, 2025

Why is this a paid offering when you're effectively piggybacking on open source technology to achieve this? Especially when your competitors like Amazon offer this natively for free. 🤦‍♂️

Sam_Foo's avatar
Sam_Foo
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Dec 09, 2025

At the time of writing, I'm not aware of any cloud providers that offer eBPF Host Routing natively for free in the same manner. EKS Anywhere defaults to Cilium, however the user still has to manually pass in Helm values. EKS with ENI mode (Cilium Quick Installation — Cilium 1.19.0-dev documentation) is analogous to BYOCNI which can use eBPF Host Routing through a self-managed install, but not what this blog is discussing.

This ACNS offering is about simplifying the user experience (guardrails for requirements such as kernel versions, iptables rules, configuration) around a support model.