eBPF is a hot topic right now; most of the infrastructure-focused conferences and events have included talks on eBPF over the past year, which is creating a lot of interest in the technology. You might be wondering what eBPF is. eBPF stands for “extended Berkeley Packet Filter” which is a feature in modern Linux kernels that allows you to write mini-programs that are attached to low-level hooks in the Linux kernel, that execute based on certain events (e.g. filtering network traffic).

Calico is an open source networking and network security solution for containers, virtual machines, and native host-based workloads. Calico supports a broad range of platforms including Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker EE, OpenStack, and bare metal. In this blog, we will focus on Kubernetes pod networking and network security using Calico. Calico uses etcd as the back-end datastore. When you run Calico on Kubernetes, you can use the same etcd datastore through the Kubernetes API server.

Welcome to the April 2020 edition of the Tigera Calicommunication newsletter! In the March edition, we discussed context-aware flow logs. This edition covers the next component of logging, the audit logs.

Container use continues to grow, and Kubernetes is the most widely adopted container orchestration system, managing nearly half of all container deployments.1 Successful integration of container services within the enterprise depends heavily on access to external resources such as databases, cloud services, third-party application programming interfaces (APIs), and other applications. All this egress activity must be controlled for security and compliance reasons.

2020 is predicted to be an exciting year with more organizations adopting Kubernetes than ever before. As critical workloads with sensitive data migrate to the cloud, we can expect to encounter various Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) targeting that environment.

Approximately one year ago, Kubernetes 1.14 made support of Windows containers running on Microsoft Windows Server nodes generally available. This was a declaration that Windows node support was stable, well-tested, and ready for adoption, meaning the vast ecosystem of Windows-based applications could be deployed on the platform.

We are excited to announce the general availability of Calico Enterprise 2.7. With this release, Fortinet’s 400,000 customers can use FortiGate to enforce network security policies into and out of the Kubernetes cluster as well as traffic between pods within the cluster.