Hybrid cloud infrastructures run critical business resources and are subject to some of the strictest network security controls. Irrespective of the industry and resource types, these controls broadly fall into three categories. Workloads (pods) running on Kubernetes are ephemeral in nature, and IP-based controls are no longer effective. The challenge is to enforce the organizational security controls on the workloads and Kubernetes nodes themselves.

Microsegmentation is a security technique that is used to isolate workloads from one another. Microsegmentation limits the blast radius of a data breach by making network security more granular. Should a breach occur, the damage is confined to the affected segment. Application workloads have evolved over time – starting from bare metal, to a mix of on-prem and cloud virtual machines and containers.

Today we are pleased to announce our partnership with Nutanix, creators of the industry’s most popular hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) technology. HCI combines datacenter hardware using locally-attached storage resources with intelligent software to create flexible building blocks that replace legacy infrastructure consisting of separate servers, storage networks, and storage arrays.

Calico was designed from the ground up with a pluggable dataplane architecture. The Calico 3.13 release introduced an exciting new eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) dataplane targeted at those ready to adopt newer kernel versions and wanting to push the Linux kernel’s latest networking capabilities to the limit.

We’re excited to announce that the latest release of Calico includes encryption for data-in-transit. Calico is the open source networking and network security solution for containers, virtual machines, and host-based workloads, offering connectivity and security for container workloads. One of Calico’s best-known security features is its implementation of Kubernetes Network Policy, providing a way to secure container workloads by restricting traffic to and from trusted sources.

What is Lateral Movement? Lateral movement refers to the techniques that a cyber-attacker uses, after gaining initial access, to move deeper into a network in search of sensitive data and other high-value assets. Lateral movement techniques are widely used in sophisticated cyber-attacks such as advanced persistent threats (APTs).

As a leading, open-source multi-cluster orchestration platform, Rancher lets operations teams deploy, manage and secure enterprise Kubernetes. Rancher also gives users a set of CNI options to choose from, including open-source Project Calico.

New applications and workloads are constantly being added to Kubernetes clusters. Those same apps need to securely communicate with resources outside the cluster behind a firewall or other control point. Firewalls require a consistent IP, but routable IPs are a limited resource that can be quickly depleted if applied to every service.

As our enterprise customers build out large, multi-cluster Kubernetes environments, they are encountering an entirely new set of security challenges, requiring solutions that operate at scale and can be deployed both on-premises and across multiple clouds.

Welcome to the May 2020 edition of Calicomm! – our monthly newsletter for customers and partners. In the April edition, we discussed audit logs. This edition covers egress access control, which is an important aspect of micro-segmentation.