Standard Linux networking was never designed for the churn and density of modern container workloads. When production clusters hit the limits of IPTables, latency spikes and CPU consumption can bring services to their knees.

This talk explores the next generation of AKS networking: Azure CNI Overlay with Cilium. We will walk through the architectural differences between VNET-integrated and Overlay networking, specifically focusing on how eBPF bypasses traditional bottlenecks. By the end of this session, attendees will have a clear understanding of performance benchmarking metrics at scale, the technical trade-offs of overlay networking, and a roadmap for migrating production workloads to a more performant, eBPF-driven future.