Calico Cloud has just celebrated its 1-year anniversary! And what better way to celebrate than to launch new features and capabilities that help users address their most urgent cloud security needs. Over the past year, the Tigera team has seen rapid adoption of Calico Cloud for security and observability of cloud-native applications.

First-generation security solutions for cloud-native applications have been failing because they apply a legacy mindset where the focus is on vulnerability scanning instead of a holistic approach to threat detection, threat prevention, and remediation. Given that the attack surface of modern applications is much larger than in traditional apps, security teams are struggling to keep up and we’ve seen a spike in breaches.

The Project Calico community is one of the most collaborative and supportive communities in the open-source space. Our community has shown great engagement through the years, which has helped us maintain and grow the project. Thanks to our 200+ contributors from all over the world, Calico Open Source (the solution born out of the project) is powering 1.5M+ nodes daily across 166 countries.

Central processing units (CPUs) can be compared to the human brain in that their unique architecture allows them to solve mathematical equations in different ways. x86 is the dominant architecture used in cloud computing at the time of this writing; however, it is worth noting that this architecture is not efficient for every scenario, and its proprietary nature is causing an industry shift toward ARM.

Monitoring is a critical part of any computer system that has been brought in to a production-ready state. No IT system exists in true isolation, and even the simplest systems interact in interesting ways with the systems “surrounding” them. Since compute time, memory, and long-term storage are all finite, it’s necessary at the very least to understand how these things are being allocated.

Like any great technology, the interest in and adoption of Kubernetes (an excellent way to orchestrate your workloads, by the way) took off as cloud native and containerization grew in popularity. With that came a lot of confusion. Everyone was using Kubernetes to move their workloads, but as they went through their journey to deployment, they weren’t thinking about security until they got to production.

When deploying cloud-native applications to a hybrid and multi-cloud environment that is protected by traditional perimeter-based firewalls, such as Palo Alto Networks (PAN) Panorama, you need to work within the confines of your existing IT security architecture. For applications that communicate with external resources outside the Kubernetes cluster, a traditional firewall is typically going to be part of that communication.

Troubleshooting container connectivity issues and performance hotspots in Kubernetes clusters can be a frustrating exercise in a dynamic environment where hundreds, possibly thousands of pods are continually being created and destroyed.

If you have access to the internet, it’s likely that you have already heard of the critical vulnerability in the Log4j library. A zero-day vulnerability in the Java library Log4j, with the assigned CVE code of CVE-2021-44228, has been disclosed by Chen Zhaojun, a security researcher in the Alibaba Cloud Security team. It’s got people worried—and with good reason.

Yes, you read that right – in the comfort of your own laptop, as in, the entire environment running inside your laptop! Why? Well, read on. It’s a bit of a long one, but there is a lot of my learning that I would like to share. I often find that Calico Open Source users ask me about BGP, and whether they need to use it, with a little trepidation. BGP carries an air of mystique for many IT engineers, for two reasons.