Engineer Replaces kube-proxy with eBPF in Homelab, Triggers 6-Hour Monitoring Blackout
A Kubernetes engineer running a four-node bare-metal homelab cluster upgraded Cilium from version 1.15 to 1.16 and enabled full eBPF-based kube-proxy replacement by flipping a single configuration flag. The change appeared successful at first, with all pods reporting healthy status, but at 2:47 AM an alert revealed that the SIEM had stopped receiving any network flow or Kubernetes audit log data. The root cause was that the eBPF datapath bypasses the iptables and conntrack layers that the security monitoring stack depended on to capture traffic. The engineer, who works with managed Kubernetes at Siemens professionally, documented the incident as a cautionary account of how replacing a core networking component can silently blind observability and security tooling. The episode highlights a broader gap in official documentation around eBPF adoption: tools built for the traditional netfilter universe do not automatically carry over into an eBPF-managed datapath.
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