Kubernetes is the de-facto platform for orchestrating containerized workloads and microservices, which are the building blocks of cloud-native applications. Kubernetes workloads are highly dynamic, ephemeral, and are deployed on a distributed and agile infrastructure. Although the benefits of cloud-native applications managed by Kubernetes are plenty, Kubernetes presents a new set of observability challenges in cloud-native applications. Let’s consider some observability challenges.

In a never-ending game of cat and mouse, threat actors are exploiting, controlling and maintaining persistent access in compromised cloud infrastructure. While cloud practitioners are armed with best-in-class knowledge, support, and security practices, it is statistically impossible to have a common security posture for all cloud instances worldwide. Attackers know this, and use it to their advantage. By applying evolved tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), attackers are exploiting edge cases.

We’re excited to announce Calico v3.20! Thank you to everyone who contributed to this release! For detailed release notes, please go here. Below are some highlights from the release.

Recently, we released our new “Calico Certified Operator: AWS Expert” course. You can read more about why we created this course and how it can benefit your organization in the introductory blog post. This blog post is different; it’s an opportunity for you, the potential learner, to get a glimpse of just a few interesting parts of the course. You won’t learn all the answers here, but you’ll learn some of the questions!

The challenges involved in deploying and managing microservices have led to the creation of the service mesh, a tool for adding observability, security, and traffic management capabilities at the application layer. While a service mesh is intended to help developers and SREs with a number of use cases related to service-to-service communication within Kubernetes clusters, a service mesh also adds operational complexity and introduces an additional control plane for security teams to manage.

Dual ToR (top of rack) peering provides a redundant path for customers with cluster applications that cannot tolerate service downtime or failure and require a high-availability solution. While Calico ToR connectivity has existed for some time, Calico Enterprise now supports connectivity with dual ToR switches.

Sometimes the best way to understand something is to take it apart and see how it works. This blog post will help you take the lid off your Calico eBPF data plane based Kubernetes cluster and see how the forwarding is actually happening. The bonus is, unlike home repairs, you don’t even have to try to figure out how to put it back together again! The target audience for this post is users who are already running a cluster with the eBPF data plane, either as a proof-of-concept or in production.

In this blog post, I will be looking at 10 best practices for Kubernetes security policy design. Application modernization is a strategic initiative that changes the way enterprises are doing business. The journey requires a significant investment in people, processes, and technology in order to achieve the desired business outcomes of accelerating the pace of innovation, optimizing cost, and improving an enterprise’s overall security posture.

As our enterprise customers build out large, multi-cluster Kubernetes environments, they are encountering an entirely new set of complex security, observability, and networking challenges, requiring solutions that operate at scale and can be deployed both on-premises and across multiple clouds. New features in our latest release add to the already formidable capabilities of Calico Enterprise.

Calico was designed from the ground up with a pluggable data plane architecture. The Enterprise 3.6 release introduces an exciting new eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) data plane that provides multiple benefits to users.