Even though Cisco acquires them, I believe this is not going to be a "RIP" story — Cilium is a graduated CNCF project, adopted by all major cloud providers, used by many fortune 100 companies, and have a rich/diverse contributors community. Plus the team at Isovalent is super strong, and eBPF powerhouse, they are going to continue working on Cilium, Tetragon, and other eBPF projects. And they've build a strong and vibrant OSS community. Cisco did a really smart and strategic move to lead a modernization of networking and security.
I agree. The team at Isovalent is extraordinary and should continue to be strong champions of BPF for network and security use cases. With Cisco footing the bill, I think we will see even more expansion into XDP traffic processing that is native to hardware vs. the current overlay model.
First Splunk, now Isovalent. Cisco has been busy this year!
I am a network engineer and have worked with Cisco stuff since the 90s.
You underestimate Cisco's ability to fuck up acquired companies. The entire point is for Cisco to fuck it up by raising prices and entrapping customers to the point where competitors and alternatives will be created where none existed before. It's Cisco's nature and there is more than two decades of history of them doing it.
This was likely always the path forward for Isovalent. Thomas Graf was at Cisco prior to building Isovalent (where I believe he was working on eBPF stuff too). Their series A had Cisco in it: https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/covalent-io-series-....
This is a somewhat common startup acquisition pattern; seen it before many times, and not just by Cisco:
>Thomas Graf was at Cisco prior to building Isovalent
>Cisco has this idea of spin-ins, that they executed on for sometime
Generalized:
Work at parent company, create something innovative, start child company to develop that, get noticed by the world, parent buys you ... profit! That is, you profit - if you're smart, and not bamboozled by their acquisition terms.
Istio is really quite interesting of a project it promises everything, has a lot of frequent new engineering solutions, and then people have to hire consultants to make them be able to do a fraction of that. It’s the SAP of the kubernetes world.
If you try to use every single feature of Istio, sure. If you just need encryption it's not that bad. And it looks to be getting better (no more sidecars, eventually).
I think it is a good outcome for Cilium. With the extent of open-source, it would have been difficult to grow their ARR. Good outcome imho, because Cisco is a networking company at heart and they know how to grow a network/security business.
Maybe you're not aware of what happens when big companies buy smaller companies that were the main stewards of open source projects. There are many comments in here detailing how much can and usually goes wrong (for contributors, users and the community at large).
Oh, I'm aware. Cisco will most likely fuck this up somehow. But this story will inspire other small companies to invest in contributing to the open source supply chain which is good for all of us.
I would guess the majority of the core team works for Isovalent but Cilium is a mature product by now, used by tens of huge companies (e.g. Google's GKE, AWS, Alibaba).
Cisco can screw (and likely will) the commercial Enterprise offering, not really the Cilium project
Two things to think about: say they make a big product direction change you don’t want – how many people are going to contribute to a community fork? Or say random, senseless acts of MBA happen and nobody is employed to work on it any more.
Those big companies are inconsistent so you can’t count on that, especially if the change doesn’t affect them or they’re already maintaining an internal fork. It’s not mission critical for them so I would not be shocked if they decided that some other approach was best for their businesses and their engineers spend time migrating instead of taking over maintainership.
I’m not saying that will or even is likely to happen but I would think about how hard it would be for you if it did because the odds of Cisco screwing up a popular project are a lot greater than zero.
Always sad to see a small player swallowed up by Cisco.
As someone who had the unfortunate experience of going through a Cisco acquisition, there's a familiar pattern.
You can expect that their product roadmap will be torn to shreds as Cisco VPs start streaming in to demand poorly designed integration projects with Cisco's terrible platforms to pad their own resumes. Talent drain ensues as Cisco's low bar for hiring starts to take effect.
The product will keep selling, since Cisco's MO is to leverage its massive sales machine to boost revenue, but there will be little concern for the actual tech itself going forward.
Yes, I was really disappointed to see this. I've pointed a lot of PM and folks to Isovalent and Cillium. I really like the idea of eBPF as it solves a lot of the issues that just are poorly handled by middleware/middlebox solutions. I'm not sure why a company like Palo Alto Networks didn't jump on this earlier. I know that this, somewhat, cannibalizes their core business model (middlebox solutions) - however I feel like it would have been more of an additional layer than a complete product line disruption.
At the end of the day this is a great buy for Cisco, but horrible news for customers. I feel as though Isovalent was a bit too early with their mouse trap, but damn is it a good one.
That is rather sad, Cisco will ruin another good product bringing it into their mediocre product lines to be marginalized to nothing over time. I've had friends that have come into Cisco through acquisition, they invariably last long enough to vest enough of their stock options and get the hell out as quick as possible, almost always 2 years on the dot. I bet Cisco HR can track that as a reliable metric.
Now the purchase of anyone by Cisco simply signals a death knell for them. Last words generally heard now are "they used to be cool".
Cisco has been different companies over the last 30 years, and it's not hard for me to believe their current incarnation is drastically more hospitable than their mid-aughts incarnation.
Not sure about 30 years ago, but for the last 20 Cisco has been the same. Mostly reliable hardware, but the software side sucks, the licensing and support fees are ridiculous, licensing without a direct connection to their cloud (or a satellite server) is a pain in the arse, sales doesn't even try to be realistic with product capability to product need match, and support is barely above worthless, even with a high-touch contact. Cisco is the same company today as they were back with Ciscoworks and MARS Protego.
Teams and founders who have built material value deserve liquidity and an exit. It sucks when they exit to these sorts of orgs, propose a better path that maintains the value but still provides the exit. Customers becoming shareholders through a direct offering comes to mind, but there are other avenues.
At some point I feel like customers are going to be extremely wary of buying anything from smaller players if they know their filet mignon is destined to instantly transform into a turd sandwich the moment the inevitable acquisition occurs.
Oh no, this is sad news. I wish Isovalent had not given in to avarice, for I cannot ascribe this to anything else. They had really good engineers, with the best inhouse eBPF expertise of any company. This news is worse than CoreOS being gobbled up by RedHat.
acquisition (or an IPO but unlikely for such a niche product company) was planned for since day one and likely part of the reason they managed to attract many of those really good engineers.
Series A $29M in 2021 by AZ and Google + Series B $40M in 2022 by, among others, Cisco itself.
don't love this framing - capitalism operates on avarice. Every for-profit company "gives in" to it to a great extent, so we shouldn't put undue blame on isovalent for just looking out for themselves and their employees.
Yes, I get it, founders, employees and VCs need a "payday". Still, I feel like I want to start leaving one of my favorite all-time comments about how people are baffled how the poor tech folk will get by if they can't sell out:
Much like different companies need a different set of people, the same company at different stages needs a different set of people.
Some people are great at the research / experimentation phase but not great when it comes to scaling up. Other people aren't great at scaling up but are great during the operational phase.
The operational phase is the only place profit is generated, but the other people need to get paid, too.
But the point is almost nobody believes a Cisco acquisition will lead to "better execution in the scaling phase".
Instead, it will lead to the inevitable enshittification as customers are milked for more and more profit while the tech decays because all the good people leave.
Totally agree with that. I remember reading an article years ago that was talking about how YouTube actually didn't have a ton of runway left before Google bought them - the hosting costs were going to kill them, and they needed someone like Google with their unique expertise at handling massive infrastructure scale (and probably only Google at that time had that experience) to join with.
So I'm not saying 100% of acquisitions are shit storms, but so often when you see these old stalwarts buy new, innovative startups, everyone is scared their products will go to shit. Just look at the giant collective sigh of release when the Figma deal fell through.
Do Cisco certifications still carry any weight? If not, is there another, non-Cisco cert that's worthwhile? I know CCNA etc. used to have value, but it seems most certifications in general are pretty worthless anymore.
IME certs are good for two things, novices who lack fundamentals and vendor partnerships (discounts and/or feature access that requires N certified devs/admins/etc.).
There's also the case where documentation is poor/nonexistent, but the vendor charges customers for 'training' and all of a sudden useful resources become available. I've always felt it's a weird way to treat _already_ paying customers, but seems common in the networking world.
One other one: you work in an environment where that is required for some reason. I’ve known people who got certs because their company contracted for a client who paid more or required some fraction of the staff to be certified. If you work in that kind of area, not leaving money on the table is certainly understandable.
All certifications are only useful to those coming into the industry. CCIE was once highly regarded, but it's in the same place now, unless some old-time contract has a clause still embedded about a cert being needed.
HN can really be quite interesting. Y’all want developers to develop open-source projects. Developers then struggle to financially sustain their projects. BigCo acquires a valuable project, providing liquidity and support to the developers. Instead of being happy for them, HN cries.
Everyone wants free software developers to slave away for free. Give away your worldly things, don't worry about feeding your family or keeping shelter over your head -- just keep on cranking out new releases out of the goodness of your own hearts.
It's just simultaneously true that people are sad about the inevitable loss of a previously open source project, and that people are happy the devs are now getting paid for their efforts.
Imo HN tends to show both once the comments settle.
Man, I read the headline three times and each time I read Cisco is acquiring insolvent. Bad idea naming a company so close to an English word both in length, number of similar characters, and most importantly first and last chars.
