Features

User-visible capabilities that span multiple systems. Each feature is enabled or disabled by Helm values and surfaces in the Cilium documentation as a separate section.

Feature	Highlights
Networking and routing	CNI, native vs overlay, IPAM modes, MTU.
Load balancing	kube-proxy replacement, socket LB, XDP LB, Maglev, DSR, LB-IPAM.
Network policy	CNP / CCNP, FQDN, L7 (HTTP/Kafka/gRPC), CIDR, deny rules.
Cluster Mesh	Multi-cluster identity, services, encryption.
Service mesh and Gateway API	Sidecar-less L7 with Envoy, Gateway API, mutual auth.
BGP control plane	BGP peering for pod CIDRs and LoadBalancer IPs.
Egress gateway	NAT egress traffic through a chosen node.
Encryption	WireGuard and IPSec node-to-node encryption.
Hubble observability	Flow logs, service map, Prometheus metrics.
Identity and security	Identity model, mutual auth, SPIFFE.

Refer to Documentation/configuration/, Documentation/network/, and Documentation/observability/ for end-user docs that cover each feature in more depth.