eBPF is a great tool for network traffic management and observation in a service cluster. However, the current tooling to deploy eBPF programs and agents often requires its own VM or containers in a k8s cluster, and this heavy infrastructure defeats the lightweight benefits of eBPF.

Wasm, on the other hand, has become a lightweight alternative “container” for the k8s ecosystem. It is now possible to create Wasm-based eBPF control plane applications that manage eBPF agents in k8s pods.

In this talk, we will discuss the eBPF plugin from the WasmEdge community (a CNCF sandbox project). It allows lightweight WasmEdge sandboxes managed by container tools such as containerd, crun, Docker, and Podman, to deploy and control eBPF applications in k8s clusters. We will discuss the mechanism that enables the eBPF plugin in WasmEdge, as well as developer APIs and tools for building eBPF applications.