Cilium reads datapath options once, at agent start, and the chart puts no
config checksum on the pod template. A changed ConfigMap therefore leaves every
agent running the previous datapath until something restarts it, and nothing
does — the DaemonSet is not rolled by a ConfigMap-only Helm change.
This already cost an outage. vlan-bpf-bypass landed in cilium-config and every
v30iot macvlan workload stayed broken until the agents were deleted by hand,
one node at a time (issue #592). The merge looked successful: HelmRelease
Ready, release upgraded, key present in the ConfigMap, and nothing working.
policyMapMax carries the same exposure. Its comment says "takes effect on agent
restart", which is documentation standing in for automation — as does the
equivalent note in the two bootstrap copies.
Reloader is already deployed and used across the repo for the same purpose.
Named per-ConfigMap rather than blanket, matching the existing convention.
The trade, stated plainly: any cilium-config change now rolls the CNI
cluster-wide, node by node. That is the same disruption a datapath change
already required; the difference is that it happens on its own rather than
being forgotten.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
claude-botandClaude Opus 5