Hello and welcome to Tech Brief, I’m your host. Today we’re talking about Cisco’s surprising return to the load balancing market. After stepping away in 2012, Cisco has teamed up with the Isovalent crew behind Cilium—acquired in 2023—to launch the new Isovalent Load Balancer.

Built on eBPF, the same Linux kernel extension Google and Meta trust for high-speed packet processing, this balancer “can process ten million packets per second on a single Intel core,” says Isovalent co-founder Thomas Graf. It runs anywhere you need it—Kubernetes containers, VMs, Cisco switches or smart NICs—and you manage every instance from a single console.

Cisco will start by selling it as a standalone product, then fold it into the Cloud Operations control plane and Nexus dashboard. Graf envisions it as “the nexus of cloud-native,” a software equivalent of Cisco’s renowned Nexus switches.

Cisco also unveiled Live Protect, an eBPF-powered tool that creates compensating controls like microsegments to shield networks until patches can be applied. That’s your one-minute update—thanks for listening!
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