By Joab Jackson
Publication Date: 2026-01-26 17:00:00
Networking giant Cisco purchased Isovalent in 2024 to get in on the cloud native action.
In our cloud native community, Isovalent was primarily known for Cilium, an Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) overlay network that worked well for Kubernetes environments, namely by replacing IP tables with in-kernel traffic routing by eBPF.
The company also built Tetragon, a vulnerability mitigation platform that Cisco has already embedded into its own smart switch software.
Today, Cisco is one of the chief purveyors of network infrastructure, gear such as routers and switches, aimed primarily at enterprises.
“They liked what we were doing, and they saw value and continue to see value in the solutions that we have for the Kubernetes world,” says Liz Rice, Isovalent chief open source officer, in an interview with The New Stack. “Cisco has this enormous global footprint across traditional networking, so being able to bridge those two things together is really nice.”
Cisco…
