From the Preface

Over the past few years, we’ve used BPF in multiple scenarios, from gathering utilization data from Kubernetes clusters to managing network traffic policies. We’ve learned its ins and outs by using it and by reading many blog posts from technology leaders like Brendan Gregg and Alexei Starovoitov and companies like Cilium and Facebook. Their articles and publications helped us tremendously in the past, and they have also been a huge reference for the development of this book.

After reading many of those resources, we realized that every time we needed to learn something about BPF, we needed to jump between many blog posts, man pages, and other places on the internet. This book is our attempt to put the knowledge scattered across the web in a central location for the next generation of BPF enthusiasts to learn about this fantastic technology.

We’ve divided our work between nine different chapters to show you what you can accomplish by using BPF. You can read some chapters in isolation as reference guides, but if you’re new to BPF, we recommend you to read them in order. That will give you an overview of the core concepts in BPF and guide you through the possibilities ahead of you.

Whether you’re already an expert in observability and performance analysis or you’re researching new possibilities to answer questions about your production systems that you couldn’t solve before, we hope you find new knowledge in this book.