Doing this at anything > 1k nodes is a pain in the butt. We decided to run many <100 nodes clusters rather than a few big ones.
One of the main issues of cilium is that the bpf maps scale with the number of nodes/pods in the cluster, so you get exponential memory growth as you add more nodes with the cilium agent on them. https://docs.cilium.io/en/stable/operations/performance/scal...