Cilium vs DANM

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.

DANM is a free network management suite for Kubernetes, originally developed as Nokia’s TelCo-grade solution. Its CNI metaplugin can give a Pod multiple network interfaces and delegate their setup to other CNI plugins. Built-in IP address management supports dynamic, static, or no IPv4 and IPv6 allocation, with up to 8 million allocations per network object. The IPVLAN CNI provides L2 interfaces and supports routes and policy-based routes in Pod network namespaces. Documented integrations include Intel SR-IOV and MACVLAN, with delegation to Calico and Flannel. Production-grade mode provides TenantNetwork and ClusterNetwork APIs for administrators managing shared resources and tenants using assigned resources. An optional Svcwatcher extends Kubernetes Service discovery across a Pod’s interfaces. A webhook validates DANM API objects and connects tenant networks to administrator-configured physical interface profiles. Users must create a Kubernetes cluster and install DANM manually; its deployment guide says there is no Docker container release. That guide identifies Kubernetes 1.17.x as tested and says versions earlier than 1.9.x are not officially supported. DANM is licensed under the 3-Clause BSD License.