In my previous blog post, I discussed how transitioning from legacy monolithic applications to microservices based applications running on Kubernetes brings a range of benefits, but that it also increases the application’s attack surface. I zoomed in on creating security policies to harden the distributed microservice application, but another key challenge this transition brings is observing and monitoring the workload communication and known and unknown security gaps.

In Kubernetes, the Domain Name System (DNS) plays a crucial role in enabling service discovery for pods to locate and communicate with other services within the cluster. This function is essential for managing the dynamic nature of Kubernetes environments and ensuring that applications can operate seamlessly. For organizations migrating their workloads to Kubernetes, it’s also important to establish connectivity with services outside the cluster.

Today, the cloud platform engineers are facing new challenges when running cloud native applications. Those applications are designed, deployed, maintained and monitored unlike traditional monolithic applications they are used to working with. Cloud native applications are designed and built to exploit the scale, elasticity, resiliency, and flexibility the cloud provides. They are a group of micro-services that are run in containers within a Kubernetes cluster and they all talk to each other.

According to the recent Datadog report on real world container usage, Redis is among the top 5 technologies used in containerized workloads running on Kubernetes. Redis database is deployed across multi-region clusters to be Highly Available(HA) to a microservices application.

We are proud to announce that we have been named one of America’s Best Startup Employers 2023 by Forbes! The Forbes list of America’s Best Startup Employers 2023 was compiled by evaluating 2,600 companies with at least 50 employees in the United States. All of the companies considered were founded between 2013 and 2020, from the ground up, and were not spin-offs of existing businesses. Just like other Forbes lists, businesses cannot pay to be considered.

Cloud computing revolutionized how a business can establish its digital presence. Nowadays, by leveraging cloud features such as scalability, elasticity, and convenience, businesses can deploy, grow, or test an environment in every corner of the world without worrying about building the required infrastructure.

Kubernetes is a highly popular and widely used container orchestration platform designed to deploy and manage containerized applications at a scale, with strong horizontal scaling capabilities that can support up to 5,000 nodes; the only limit in adding nodes to your cluster is your budget. However, its vertical scaling is restricted by its default configurations, with a cap of 110 pods per node.

We are excited to announce the early preview of Calico Enterprise 3.16. This latest release extends the active security platform’s support for egress access controls, improves the usability of network-based threat defense features, and scales visualization of Kubernetes workloads to 100s of namespaces. Let’s go through some of the highlights of this release.

The default pod provisioning mechanism in Kubernetes has a substantial attack surface, making it susceptible to malevolent exploits and container breakouts. To achieve effective runtime security, your containerized workloads in Kubernetes require multi-layer process monitoring within the container.

This blog will cover what the Calico/VPP dataplane is and demonstrate the performance and flexibility advantages of using the VPP dataplane through a benchmarking setup. By the end of this blog post, you will have a clear understanding of how Calico/VPP dataplane, with the help of DPDK and accelerated memif interfaces, can provide high throughput and low-latency Kubernetes cluster networking for your environment.