Aviatrix Kubernetes Firewall vs Cilium

Aviatrix Kubernetes Firewall governs traffic entering, leaving, and moving between Kubernetes workloads across clusters and environments. It applies Zero Trust controls at the cloud network layer, outside Kubernetes clusters, so deployment does not require sidecars, agents, CNI replacement, or application changes. Policies can target pods, namespaces, services, and labels using Kubernetes-native identities. A centralized control plane manages policy across multicloud and multicluster environments, with automation options including Terraform, Kubernetes custom resource definitions, GitOps, and policies in Kubernetes manifests. Supported environments include AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and on-premises deployments, including EKS, AKS, and GKE. The product offers traffic visibility, observability, and anomaly detection, along with distributed firewalling, threat prevention, URL filtering, egress control, micro-segmentation, TLS decryption, DNS firewalling, and advanced NAT for overlapping address ranges. It can use a shared security model for containerized and legacy VM workloads. There is no free plan.

Cilium is an open-source, cloud-native system for providing, securing, and observing network connectivity between workloads using eBPF. Its networking capabilities include CNI, Layer 4 load balancing, Cluster Mesh, kube-proxy replacement, BGP, service mesh, Gateway API, IPv6, host firewall, and ingress. Network policies can enforce identity-aware rules from L3 through L7, including DNS- and HTTP-aware filtering. Security features include runtime protection and transparent encryption of managed host and endpoint traffic using IPsec, WireGuard, or ztunnel; ztunnel support is marked beta. For visibility, Cilium lists service maps, metrics and tracing export, network flow logs, and protocol visibility. Hubble, built on Cilium and eBPF, provides visibility into service communication and behavior. Documentation describes Prometheus and Grafana integrations and Kubernetes support for services including GKE, AKS, EKS, OpenShift, RKE, k3s, and Alibaba ACK. Its container image requires AMD64 or AArch64 hosts running Linux kernel 5.10 or later, or an equivalent kernel such as 4.18 on RHEL 8.10. For environments above 500 nodes, the quick installation guide directs readers to large-environment guidance or specific datapath modes.