Amazon EKS Anywhere is an official Kubernetes distribution from AWS. It’s a new deployment option for Amazon EKS that allows the creation and operation of on-premises Kubernetes clusters on your existing infrastructure.

Public cloud infrastructures and microservices are pushing the limits of resources and service delivery beyond what was imaginable until very recently. In order to keep up with the demand, network infrastructures and network technologies had to evolve as well. Software-defined networking (SDN) is the pinnacle of advancement in cloud networking; by using SDN, developers can now deliver an optimized, flexible networking experience that can adapt to the growing demands of their clients.

Internet-facing applications are some of the most targeted workloads by threat actors. Securing this type of application is a must in order to protect your network, but this task is more complex in Kubernetes than in traditional environments, and it poses some challenges. Not only are threats magnified in a Kubernetes environment, but internet-facing applications in Kubernetes are also more vulnerable than their counterparts in traditional environments.

This post will highlight and explain the importance of a pluggable data plane. But in order to do so, we first need an analogy. It’s time to talk about a brick garden wall! Imagine you have been asked to repair a brick garden wall, because one brick has cracked through in the summer sun. You have the equipment you need, so the size of the job will depend to a great extent on how easily the brick can be removed from the wall without interfering with all the ones around it. Good luck.

We are excited to announce Calico Enterprise 3.9, which provides faster and simpler live troubleshooting using Dynamic Packet Capture for organizations while meeting regulatory and compliance requirements to access the underlying data. The release makes application-level observability resource-efficient, less security intrusive, and easier to manage. It also includes pod-to-pod encryption with Microsoft AKS and AWS EKS with AWS CNI.

It has been a while since I have been excited to write about encrypted tunnels. It might be the sheer pain of troubleshooting old technologies, or countless hours of falling down the rabbit hole of a project’s source code, that always motivated me to pursue a better alternative (without much luck). However, I believe luck is finally on my side.

Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) is a relatively new feature for Linux kernels that has many DevOps, SREs, and engineers excited. But is it a one-stop shop solution for all of your Linux kernel needs? Let’s take a look at what eBPF does well, and how it stacks up against standard Linux iptables.

Kubernetes operations (kOps) is one of the official Kubernetes (K8s) projects. The kOps project allows for rapid deployment of production-grade K8s clusters in multiple cloud platforms. By leveraging yaml manifests, kOps delivers a familiar experience to users who have worked with kubectl. Similar to K8s clusters in popular cloud platforms, kOps helps set up self-managed clusters to easily deliver high availability.

In the Kubernetes ecosystem there are a variety of ways for you to provision your cluster, and which one you choose generally depends on how well it integrates with your existing knowledge or your organization’s established tools. Kubespray is a tool built using Ansible playbooks, inventories, and variable files—and also includes supplemental tooling such as Terraform examples for provisioning infrastructure.

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.