Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

2022 has been a year full of new releases, new events, and new projects for Open Source Calico. Let’s take a look at Project Calico’s 2022 highlights and see if you’ve missed any exciting news.

By 2025, Gartner estimates that over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021. This momentum of these workloads and solutions presents a significant opportunity for companies that can meet the challenges of the burgeoning industry.

We’ve just released Calico v3.25! This milestone release includes a number of eBPF dataplane improvements designed to deliver an even faster upgrade experience, smaller memory footprint, and shorter eBPF networking object load time speed. But before we get into the details of these changes, let’s welcome and thank our new community problem-solvers who got their first contribution requests merged into our beloved project.

Cloud computing and the use of cloud native architectures enable unparalleled performance, flexibility, and velocity. The speed of innovation has driven significant advancements across industries, but as digitalization continues pushing applications and services to the cloud, bad actors’ intrusion techniques have also become more sophisticated.

Microservices are loosely coupled software that provides flexibility and scalability to a cloud environment. However, securing this open architecture from vulnerabilities and malicious actors can be challenging without a service mesh. This blog post will demonstrate how you can create an Istio and Calico integration to establish a service mesh that will manipulate HTTP traffic in the application layer.

Tigera provides the industry’s only active Cloud-Native Application Security Platform (CNAPP) for containers and Kubernetes. Available as a fully managed SaaS (Calico Cloud) or a self-managed service (Calico Enterprise), the platform prevents, detects, troubleshoots, and automatically mitigates exposure risks of security issues in build, deploy, and runtime stages across multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and hybrid deployments.

Kubernetes has come of age with more organizations adopting a microservices architecture at scale. But scale brings a whole slew of new challenges, especially with Kubernetes, which is designed to operate as a single cluster. However, the usage of Kubernetes, especially at leading-edge organizations operating at scale, has crossed the single-cluster threshold.

Cloud-native applications offer a lot of flexibility and scalability, but to leverage these advantages, we must create and deploy a suitable environment that will enable cloud-native applications to work their magic. Managed services, self-managed services, and bare metal are three primary categories of Kubernetes deployment in a cloud environment.

Companies are increasingly adopting managed Kubernetes services, such as Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), to build container-based applications. Leveraging a managed Kubernetes service is a quick and easy way to deploy an enterprise-grade Kubernetes cluster, offload mundane operations such as provisioning new nodes, upgrading the OS/Kubernetes, and scaling resources according to business needs.

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.