Cilium vs TeraFlowSDN

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.

TeraFlowSDN is an open-source, cloud-native software-defined networking controller for smart connectivity services and networks beyond 5G. Its microservices architecture orchestrates and controls networks end to end. The toolbox supports experiments in flow aggregation, network-equipment integration, AI and machine-learning security, and forensic evidence for multi-tenancy. Southbound drivers cover NetConf/OpenConfig, gNMI/OpenConfig, ONF Transport API, P4, IETF L2VPN and ACTN, optical interfaces, microwave, and related protocols. Northbound connectors include the TFS API, bandwidth management, L2VPN and L3VPN service delivery, topology, and network slices. The API exposes gRPC methods for contexts, topologies, devices, links, services, slices, connections, and policies. Release 7 highlights P4 integration and optical-network automation with telemetry, KPI management, analytics, and self-healing. Deployment is on-premises through MicroK8s on Ubuntu Server, with a documented minimum of 4 CPU cores, 8 GB RAM, 60 GB disk, and one 1 GbE NIC. It is licensed under Apache 2.0 and free to use.