Productive, scalable, and cost-effective, cloud infrastructure empowers innovation and faster deliverables. It’s a no-brainer why organizations are migrating to the cloud and containerizing their applications. As businesses scale their cloud infrastructure, they cannot be bottlenecked by security concerns. One way to release these bottlenecks and free up resources is by using automation.

A couple of weeks ago, TIgera engineers released the new version of Calico, as part of a community effort to drive cloud security and networking even further. But before I begin diving into the details of this new release, I want to first spotlight a few of our community members who have merged their contributions to Calico Open Source for the first time.

In this issue of the Calico Community Spotlight series, I’ve asked Burak Tahtacioglu from ParkLab Technology to share his experience with Kubernetes and Calico Open Source. Let’s take a look at how Burak started his Kubernetes journey, and the insights he gained from Calico Open Source. Q: Please tell us a little bit about yourself, including where you currently work and what you do there. I am a Sr. Software Developer in our Developer Experience team.

When people hear ‘microservices’ they often think about Kubernetes, which is a declarative container orchestrator. Because of its declarative nature, Kubernetes treats microservices as entities, which presents some challenges when it comes to troubleshooting. Let’s take a look at why troubleshooting microservices in a Kubernetes environment can be challenging, and some best practices for getting it right.

With the recent advancements in service delivery through containers, Linux has gained a lot of popularity in cloud computing by enabling digital businesses to expand easily regardless of their size or budget. These advancements have also brought a new wave of attack, which is challenging to address with the same tools we have been using for non cloud-native environments.

In this issue of the Calico Community Spotlight series, I’ve asked Jintao Zhang from API7.ai to share his experience with Kubernetes and Calico Open Source. API7.ai is an open-source infrastructure software company that helps businesses manage and visualize business-critical traffic, such as APIs and microservices to accelerate business decisions through data.

Cloud-native applications running on Kubernetes rely on container network plugins to establish workload communication. While Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) provides several supported networking options (kubenet and Azure CNI) that address the needs of most deployments, Microsoft recently introduced the ability to bring your own networking solution, called BYOCNI, to help users address more advanced networking requirements. This new feature enables AKS customers to run Calico networking on AKS.

We are proud to announce that we have won the 2022 Microsoft OSS on Azure Partner of the Year award! The Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards recognize Microsoft partners that have developed and delivered outstanding Microsoft-based applications, services, and devices during the past year. Awards were classified in various categories, with honorees chosen from a set of more than 3,900 submitted nominations from more than 100 countries worldwide.

It’s right there on our community page—the statement that “Project Calico is first and foremost a community.” With that in mind, we wanted to make it easier for new contributors to get involved. It’s a win-win scenario—developers experience less frustration, they can get their work done, and have their contributions considered. Plus, the project can easily benefit from the contributions.

Project Calico has offered a production-ready data plane based on eBPF since September 2020, and it’s been available for technical evaluation for even longer (since February 2020). The pre-requisites and limitations are simple to review, it’s easy to enable, and it’s easy to validate your configuration. So, there’s never been a better time to start experiencing the benefits! You do know what those are, don’t you? Don’t worry if not!