This article has been writteb by Bill Mulligan, Governing Board Chair eBPF Foundation.
The eBPF ecosystem is evolving incredibly fast, and keeping track of the players shaping this space just got easier. Today, we’re excited to introduce the eBPF Company Landscape.
While this initiative was heavily inspired by the CNCF landscape, we wanted to take a slightly different approach. The catalog of open source eBPF projects already lives at ebpf.io, so this new landscape focuses on the companies building products with eBPF, using it in production, and contributing back to the ecosystem. As noted in our recent whitepaper, eBPF is rapidly moving beyond early adopters and hyperscalers, becoming the strategic platform of choice for infrastructure teams. This landscape documents and tracks that evolution.
A Wave of Acquisitions and Market Expansion
If you want proof of eBPF’s commercial momentum, just look at the string of market acquisitions. In the past 10 years, there have been 24 acquisitions and it is only accelerating. You can find all of the acquisitions and their details by looking for the yellow handshake in the upper right corner of the boxes or find the full analysis in our report: The eBPF Re-Platforming Thesis: An Investor’s Due-Diligence Guide.
The landscape is also segmented into different categories with the traditional ones being networking, observability, profiling, and security. However, the technology is also expanding into entirely new territories. Just recently, DoiT acquired Attribute, a startup that uses eBPF programs to unlock cloud cost visibility and attribution. This marks a major ecosystem milestone because it’s the first eBPF acquisition operating completely outside the traditional domains and is a powerful validation of eBPF’s flexibility as a foundational technology.
Security Leads the Way
While eBPF is branching into novel areas like FinOps, looking at the stats page, Security currently stands out with the largest number of companies on the landscape at 41. eBPF provides enforcement and visibility via dynamic, secure, low-overhead, and efficient programs that run directly in the kernel. Looking ahead, I believe this sector holds the most commercial potential as enterprises demand deeper, highly efficient security architectures especially in the age of AI.
Highlighting Ecosystem Contributions
Open source communities thrive on contributions, whether that means investing engineering time or providing financial backing. To make it easy for end users to identify active participants, the eBPF Company Landscape gives prime real estate to the organizations driving the technology forward.
- Technical Contributors: Companies directly committing code and engineering hours to upstream development.
- Foundation Members: Organizations whose financial support flows straight back into sustaining the upstream project.
Help Us Map the Ecosystem
Like eBPF itself, this landscape is an open source community project and meant to be a living resource for everyone to leverage.
If your company is using eBPF, building products with it, contributing upstream, or you notice something we’ve missed, we’d love your help. Submit a pull request, open an issue, or suggest a new company. The ecosystem is growing too quickly for any one person or organization to track alone.
Explore the landscape at landscape.ebpf.foundation, browse or contribute to the source on github.com/ebpffoundation/landscape, and help us map the future of eBPF!