Service mesh & cluster networking

Cilium

cilium/cilium

Popular

eBPF-based CNI providing networking, load balancing, network policy and Hubble observability.

Istio

istio/istio

Popular

Most widely deployed service mesh: mTLS, traffic management and telemetry, with sidecar-less ambient mode.

Linkerd

linkerd/linkerd2

Lightweight, security-focused service mesh with a Rust micro-proxy; stable releases come from Buoyant.

Calico

projectcalico/calico

Popular

Widely deployed CNI and network-policy engine supporting eBPF, iptables and Windows nodes.

Gateway API

kubernetes-sigs/gateway-api

Trending

Kubernetes' role-oriented successor to Ingress for HTTP, gRPC and TCP routing across implementations.

Envoy Gateway

envoyproxy/gateway

Rising

Envoy-based implementation of the Kubernetes Gateway API; a common landing spot after ingress-nginx.

Consul

hashicorp/consul

HashiCorp service discovery, KV store and service mesh spanning VMs and Kubernetes.

MetalLB

metallb/metallb

Provides LoadBalancer Services for bare-metal Kubernetes clusters using ARP or BGP.

CoreDNS

coredns/coredns

Popular

Flexible, plugin-based DNS server and the default cluster DNS in Kubernetes; CNCF graduated.