What Is eBPF?

What Is eBPF?

by Liz Rice
Released April 2022
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 9781492097259

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Book description

In just the past few years, the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) has gone from relative obscurity to one of the hottest technology areas in modern infrastructure computing. With this report, Liz Rice dives into eBPF and explains how this framework enables networking, security, and observability tooling for modern compute environments. SREs, ops engineers, and engineering team leads will learn what eBPF is and why it's so powerful.

Rice, chief open source officer at Isovalent, shows you how to load and run custom eBPF programs within the kernel of your operating system, modifying the way the kernel behaves. You'll learn what's required to build eBPF-enabled tools, and why eBPF has become so prevalent in such a short period of time.

With this report, you will:

  • Learn why the ability to dynamically change the kernel behavior is so useful, and how eBPF is a game-changer when it comes to making kernel changes
  • See what's involved in writing eBPF code with a programming example to understand how the process works
  • Explore an overview of eBPF-enabled tools that you can use to instrument your cloud native applications

Product information

  • Title: What Is eBPF?
  • Author(s): Liz Rice
  • Release date: April 2022
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9781492097259