Cisco returns to load balancing market as it chases VMware refugees

Cisco Live Cisco has returned to the load balancing market using open-source software proven at scale by both Google and Meta.

The networking giant quit load balancers in 2012 when it decided to stop work on its Application Control Engine load balancers. Its return is being handled by the team from Isovalent – the company behind the Cilium networking and security tool – which Cisco acquired in 2023.

Isovalent co-founder and CTO Thomas Graf, now a vice president in Cisco’s security business, said Cisco customers asked it to develop a load balancer that could run in Kubernetes containers, VMs, and on existing infrastructure. Plenty of those inquiries came from VMware customers who used its virtual load balancers and sought alternatives after Broadcom changed VMware licenses in ways that nearly always increased costs.

Cilium runs as a program in eBPF, an open-source tech derived from the extended Berkeley Packet Filter that effectively ...