Connecting distributed Kubernetes with Cilium and SD-WAN: Building an intelligent network fabric

The challenge of distributed Kubernetes networking Towards an intelligent network fabric Bridging Kubernetes and SD-WAN with Cilium The role of a Kubernetes operator Enforcing traffic policies with Cilium and Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN End-to-end policy enforcement example Future directions: Observability and SLO awareness Conclusion Learn more Posted on October 25, 2025 by Gábor Rétvári and Tamás Lévai, Cisco CNCF projects highlighted in this post Learn how Kubernetes-native traffic management and SD-WAN integration can deliver consistent security, observability, and performance across distributed clusters. Modern businesses are rapidly adopting distributed architectures to meet growing demands for performance, resilience, and global reach. This shift is driven by emerging workloads that demand distributed infrastructure: AI/ML model training distributed across GPU clusters, real-time edge analytics processing IoT data streams, and global enterprise operations that require seamless connectivity across on-premises workloads, data centers, cloud providers, and edge locations. Today businesses are increasingly struggling to ensure secure, reliable and high-performance global connectivity while maintaining visibility across this distributed infrastructure. How do you maintain consistent end-to-end policies when applications traverse multiple network boundaries? How do you optimize performance for latency-sensitive critical applications when they could be running anywhere? And how do you gain clear visibility into application communication across this complex, multi-cluster, multi-cloud landscape? This is where a modern, integrated approach to networking becomes essential, one that understands both the intricacies of Kubernetes and the demands of wide-area connectivity. Let’s explore a proposal for seamlessly bridging your Kubernetes clusters, regardless of location, while intelligently managing the underlying network paths. Such an integrated approach solves several critical business needs: Unified security posture : Consistent policy enforcement from the wide-area network down to individual microservices. Optimized performance : Intelligent traffic routing that adapts to real-time conditions and application requirements. Global visibility : End-to-end observability across all layers of the network stack. In this post we discuss how to interconnect Cilium with a Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) fabric to extend Kubernetes-native traffic management and security policies into the underlying network interconnect. Learn how such integration simplifies operations while delivering the performance and security modern distributed workloads demand. Imagine a globally distributed service deployed across dozens of locations worldwide.