New State of eBPF Report Examines eBPF’s Impact on Software Application Development

The eBPF
Foundation, which brings together a cross-platform community of eBPF-related
projects from across the open source ecosystem in an independent forum, has
published a new report, The State
of eBPF. Created in collaboration with Linux
Foundation Research, the report explores the history of eBPF, and the impact it
is having on application development. 

eBPF
allows users to run custom programs inside an operating system such as the
Linux kernel or Windows, making execution up to ten times faster and more
efficient for key parts of what makes our computing lives work. That includes
observability, which enables engineers to see where a system is going wrong and
find fixes faster, networking, which involves everything from how fast emails
move to how fast computation occurs, to security, which keeps our digital lives
and infrastructure safer from cyber threats.

The State
of eBPF is a qualitative research report which covers the evolution of eBPF,
the revolution it created, what’s being built with it today, challenges, and
where it is heading. The report provides valuable insight into how to make the
most of what eBPF offers currently, plans for the future, and how stakeholders
can get involved with the project to help it continue to improve. More than a
dozen key maintainers and contributors to eBPF were interviewed for the report,
along with analyzing publicly available repositories of eBPF-related projects.

“Adoption
of eBPF and related projects has continued to accelerate to the point where it
is being used at scales from small deployments up to hyperscale cloud
operations across billions of devices, and by default in many operating
systems,” said Linux Foundation SVP of Research Hilary Carter. “The State of
eBPF report is a valuable resource for the community to better understand the
value of eBPF and how they can further benefit from it in the future.”

The State
of eBPF is available to download for free.