All Syself Autopilot clusters use Cilium as their networking layer.
One of the key advantages of Cilium is Hubble, a network observability platform built on top of eBPF. Hubble provides visibility into how workloads communicate inside your Kubernetes cluster and helps operators understand, troubleshoot, and secure network traffic.
Unlike traditional packet capture tools, Hubble understands Kubernetes concepts such as pods, namespaces, services, labels, and network policies.
This makes it significantly easier to investigate connectivity issues and understand application communication patterns.
As Kubernetes environments grow, understanding how applications communicate becomes increasingly difficult.
Modern applications often consist of dozens of services communicating across multiple nodes, namespaces, and environments. When connectivity problems occur, it can be challenging to determine whether the issue is caused by DNS, service discovery, network policies, firewalls, or application configuration.
Network observability provides visibility into these communication flows and helps answer questions such as:
This visibility is especially valuable when implementing security controls such as Network Policies.
Hubble provides real-time visibility into network traffic flowing through the cluster.
Depending on your configuration, it can show:
Because Hubble is built into Cilium, it can associate network events with Kubernetes resources instead of only showing IP addresses.
For example, rather than displaying traffic between two IPs, Hubble can identify the exact pods and namespaces involved in the communication.
One of the most common uses for Hubble is diagnosing why workloads cannot communicate.
For example:
Hubble allows operators to inspect traffic flows and quickly determine where communication is failing.
Many teams inherit Kubernetes environments without complete documentation of service dependencies.
Hubble can help visualize which applications communicate with one another, making it easier to understand architecture and identify unexpected communication paths.
Before enforcing restrictive network policies, it is important to understand how applications communicate.
Hubble allows operators to observe traffic patterns and verify that policies match actual application requirements.
For more information, see Network Policies with Cilium.
Hubble can also assist during security investigations by providing visibility into workload communications.
Unexpected outbound traffic, unusual service dependencies, or denied connections may indicate configuration issues or suspicious activity that requires further investigation.
Hubble can be accessed through the Cilium command-line tools and user interface.
The exact deployment model depends on your cluster configuration and operational requirements.
For installation and usage instructions, refer to the official Cilium documentation:
https://docs.cilium.io/en/stable/observability/hubble/
The following command displays live network flows observed by Hubble:
This allows operators to watch traffic as it traverses the cluster.
Results can be filtered by namespace, pod, protocol, labels, and many other attributes.
For example:
or:
These filters can be extremely useful when troubleshooting application-specific issues.
One of Hubble's most useful capabilities is showing why traffic was denied.
For example, if a Network Policy blocks a connection, Hubble can identify the policy decision responsible for the drop.
This significantly simplifies troubleshooting compared to traditional networking tools where operators often need to inspect firewall rules, packet captures, and application logs separately.
Visibility is an important part of any Zero Trust architecture.
Before communication can be restricted, it must first be understood.
Hubble helps organizations:
Many teams use Hubble as the first step when implementing workload isolation and network segmentation.
For a broader overview, see Zero Trust in Kubernetes.
Many compliance frameworks require organizations to understand and audit communication between systems.
Hubble provides valuable visibility that can support operational reviews, security investigations, and compliance initiatives by making network activity observable and easier to analyze.
While Hubble is not a compliance solution by itself, it can be an important component of a broader observability and security strategy.
Observability is often the foundation of both troubleshooting and security initiatives.
The Syself team can help design observability strategies, implement Cilium and Hubble, build Zero Trust networking architectures, and improve visibility into production Kubernetes environments.
If you would like assistance with Kubernetes networking or observability, contact the Syself team.