Calico is the industry standard for Kubernetes networking and security. It offers a proven platform for your workloads across a huge range of environments, including cloud, hybrid, and on-premises. Calico has had a high-quality, production-ready, performant, eBPF data plane option for some time! However, although many users are deploying it in production and benefitting, we still sometimes see users who don’t know that Calico has an eBPF data plane or feel confident deploying it, and.

Last June, Tigera announced a first for Kubernetes: supporting open-source WireGuard for encrypting data in transit within your cluster. We never like to sit still, so we have been working hard on some exciting new features for this technology, the first of which is support for WireGuard on AKS using the Azure CNI. First a short recap about what WireGuard is, and how we use it in Calico.

A single Kubernetes cluster expends a small percentage of its total available assigned resources on delivering in-cluster networking. We don’t have to be satisfied with this, though—achieving the lowest possible overhead can provide significant cost savings and performance improvements if you are running network-intensive workloads.

It’s that time again; we’re really happy to announce Calico v3.21! As always, thank you to everyone who contributed to this release! For detailed release notes, please go here. Alongside the usual-but-essential bug fixes and other improvements, there are some big new improvements to be aware of.

Cloud-native transformations come with many security and troubleshooting challenges. Real-time intrusion detection and the prevention of continuously evolving threats is challenging for cloud-native applications in Kubernetes. Due to the ephemeral nature of pods, it is difficult to determine source or destination endpoints and limit their blast radius. Traditional perimeter-based firewalls are not ideal fit for Kubernetes and containers.

With the Calico 3.10 release, Dynamic Packet Capture is available in Dynamic Service Graph. This means users who require self-service, live troubleshooting for microservices and Kubernetes workloads can capture and evaluate traffic packets on endpoints without writing a single line of code or using any 3rd-party troubleshooting tools. Users don’t need to learn about or have knowledge of kubectl or YAML to troubleshoot their microservices and Kubernetes cluster.

In this blog post, I will be talking about label standard and best practices for Kubernetes security. This is a common area where I see organizations struggle to define the set of labels required to meet their security requirements. My advice is to always start with a hierarchical security design that is capable of achieving your enterprise security and compliance requirements, then define your label standard in alignment with your design.

October marks the five-year anniversary of Calico Open Source, the most widely adopted solution for container networking and security. Calico Open Source was born out of Project Calico, an open-source project with an active development and user community, and has grown to power 1.5M+ nodes daily across 166 countries. When Calico was introduced 5 years ago, the world—and technology—was much different from what it is today.

Containers have changed how applications are developed and deployed, with Kubernetes ascending as the de facto means of orchestrating containers, speeding development, and increasing scalability. Modern application workloads with microservices and containers eventually need to communicate with other applications or services that reside on public or private clouds outside the Kubernetes cluster. However, securely controlling granular access between these environments continues to be a challenge.

Calico Cloud is an industry-first security and observability SaaS platform for Kubernetes, containers, and cloud. Since its launch, we have seen customers use Calico Cloud to address a range of security and observability problems for regulatory and compliance requirements in a matter of days and weeks. In addition, they only paid for the services used, instead of an upfront investment commitment, thus aligning their budgets with their business needs.