Why eBPF Is the Non-AI Tech Every Developer Should Watch in 2026
In 2026, eBPF is the one non‑AI technology that keeps showing up everywhere in modern infrastructure work. As a software developer, it feels like the same kind of under‑the‑radar shift that containers were before everyone suddenly “used Docker.”
How I Think About eBPF
When I think about eBPF, I don’t think “kernel magic,” I think “programmable hooks into reality.” Instead of sprinkling agents, sidecars, and daemons all over my stack, I can attach tiny, sandboxed programs directly to kernel events—syscalls, network packets, tracepoints—and get consistent behavior and data, regardless of what language or framework the app uses.
As a developer, that means I can answer questions like “what is my service actually doing on the network?” or “which process is hammering disk I/O?” without recompiling apps, redeploying containers, or convincing every team to adopt a particular SDK.
Why It Matters To My Day‑To‑Day Work
For me, the big deal is how eBPF collapses layers I used to accept as unavoidable. Things I previously did with iptables rules, sidecar proxies, host agents, or LD_PRELOAD tricks can often be done with one eBPF‑based data plane, closer to the kernel and with less overhead.
That shows up in three places I care about as a dev:
- Observability: eBPF lets tools capture latency, traces, and network flows for all services on a node, even if one team forgot to add instrumentation.
- Networking: eBPF‑powered projects like Cilium can implement load balancing, service discovery, and network policy inside the kernel, which means fewer moving parts in my app manifests.
- Security: runtime security tools can hook syscalls and process activity to detect and block suspicious behavior in real time, which makes production incidents a bit less terrifying.
All of this means fewer “it works on my laptop” moments and more “we can see and control what’s actually happening in prod.”
Why I’m Watching It In 2026
Over the last couple of years, eBPF has quietly gone from “kind of scary kernel toy” to “supported and standardized enough that companies will bet products on it.” The eBPF Foundation highlights growing adoption across cloud providers and architectures, and there is now a visible pile of real‑world case studies and apps using it for networking, security, and observability.
At the same time, an entire wave of startups has built their core product around eBPF—especially in observability and cloud monitoring—and they are raising serious money, such as eBPF‑native monitoring vendors pulling in multi‑tens‑of‑millions rounds. As a developer, that signals this is no longer experimental; it is becoming the default way a lot of low‑level platform features will be implemented.
Real‑World Usage Examples
Tracing mystery latency without code changes
One pattern I keep running into is the “mystery latency” ticket: a service suddenly starts responding slowly, but none of the usual logs or metrics show why. With eBPF‑style tooling, I can attach to kernel‑level events—syscalls, TCP connections, CPU scheduling—and see which functions, queries, or external calls are burning time, without touching the application code or rolling a new build.
From a developer’s perspective, it feels like attaching a debugger to the entire node instead of a single process, and it still works when the service is written in a language I do not know.
Debugging cross‑service issues in Kubernetes
In a typical Kubernetes cluster, half of the pain is figuring out which service is actually at fault when “the system is slow.” eBPF‑driven networking and observability tools can watch traffic for every pod on a node, build a live map of which services are talking to which, and show latency between them—all without injecting sidecars into each deployment.
That lets me debug cross‑service issues from one unified view rather than juggling different agents, SDKs, and dashboards per language or team.
Replacing ad‑hoc iptables rules with policies
Previously, enforcing network policy often meant messy iptables rules or cloud‑provider‑specific firewalls that nobody wanted to touch. eBPF‑powered networking projects move that logic into the kernel with higher‑level policies like “service A can talk to service B on port 443,” which then compile down to efficient kernel programs.
As a developer, I do not have to be a firewall guru to understand how my service is allowed to communicate; I can read the policy as code and let eBPF handle the low‑level translation.
Catching suspicious behavior at runtime
Security‑wise, eBPF makes it possible to watch process and syscall activity live and fire alerts when something weird happens, such as a container suddenly spawning a shell or touching sensitive paths. Instead of bolting on heavy agents, an eBPF‑based runtime security tool can sit close to the kernel, see everything, and still keep overhead low enough for production.
For me, this shows up as clearer, more actionable alerts in incident channels, because the system can point to the exact process and syscall pattern that triggered the rule.
How I’d Pitch This To Other Devs
If I were talking to another engineer about why to care this year, I would frame it like this:
- eBPF is making the kernel a platform you can program, not just a black box under your containers.
- A lot of the pain we feel around observability, network policy, and runtime security is being re‑implemented once, cleanly, at the eBPF layer instead of many times in different agents and proxies.
- Learning the basics—what hooks exist, how programs are attached, what tools and higher‑level projects are available—will pay off regardless of whether you write Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
So while everyone else is only watching AI in 2026, I am also watching the quiet shift where more of our tooling moves into eBPF land. That is the layer that will shape how our code behaves in production, even when we never touch a kernel header ourselves.
Some Extra References
[2] The State of eBPF - Linux Foundation Research
[3] Key Use Cases for eBPF: Observability, Networking, Security, Tracing - DoHost
[4] eBPF: Next Generation Observability - MantisNet
[5] eBPF Ecosystem Progress in 2024/2025: A Technical Deep Dive - Eunomia
[6] eBPF Networking Paper - WJAETS Journal
[7] eBPF Abuse: Linux Kernel Visibility Gap - LinuxSecurity
[8] The eBPF Foundation’s 2025 Year in Review
[10] Groundcover Grows Funding for eBPF-Based Observability Tech - Network World
[11] Israeli Groundcover Grabs $35M to Redefine Cloud Monitoring - TechFundingNews