Community Spotlight series: Calico Open Source user insights from Saurabh Mishra

In this issue of the Calico Community Spotlight series, I’ve asked Saurabh Mishra from Vodafone to share his experience with Kubernetes and Calico Open Source. Let’s take a look at how Saurabh started his Kubernetes journey and the insights he gained from Calico Open Source.

Q: Please tell us a little bit about yourself, including where you currently work and what you do there. 

I am working as a DevOps Manager with Vodafone Group. I am responsible for managing Kubernetes and cloud-based environments. I’m particularly interested in all things related to cloud, automation, machine learning, and DevOps.

Q: What orchestrator(s) have you been using?

Kubernetes.

Q: What cloud infrastructure(s) has been a part of your projects?

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Q: There are many people who are just getting started with Kubernetes and might have a lot of questions. Could you please talk a little bit about your own journey?

Kubernetes is a fully open-source project. It’s purposely designed this way so it can work with other open-source tools to create continuous improvements and innovations.  In our team, we are using Kubernetes in non-production and production environments to run and manage critical Continue reading

Project Calico wants to hear from you! The 2023 Calico Open Source Adoption Survey

Project Calico is made possible thanks to you—thank you for your ongoing support of Project Calico, and for being an essential part of our growing open-source community. To improve Calico, we want to hear from you.

That’s why we’ve created the 2023 Calico Open Source Adoption Survey, a 16-question survey designed specifically to help us gather your feedback and insights.

Why take this survey?

Not only will this be a chance to share extensive feedback,  your input will actually help us prioritize future development efforts and ensure that we are addressing the most pressing needs of the community. We want to make sure that Project Calico continues to be the best possible solution for networking and security in Kubernetes and container environments.

We know that your time is valuable, but we believe that your feedback is essential to our success. We hope that you will take a few moments to complete the survey and share your thoughts with us.

Thank you again for your continued support, and we look forward to hearing from you soon.

Take the survey

The post Project Calico wants to hear from you! The 2023 Calico Open Source Adoption Survey appeared first on Tigera.

Meet Calico at KubeCon EU 2023!

KubeCon EU 2023 is happening from April 18-21 in Amsterdam. We are very excited to announce that Project Calico will be attending, so come meet us at booth #S28—we’ll be there from 10:30 am onwards!

Chat and learn

At the event, you’ll have an opportunity to meet our Project Calico team, collect cool Calico swags, and ask questions in person. Whether you’re an expert Kubernetes user or just getting started, the Project Calico community is here to provide guidance on best practices and help you get the most out of Calico. Here are some of the things you can learn at our booth:

• Simplified networking: Calico provides a simple, easy-to-use networking solution for Kubernetes. With Calico, you can easily set up and manage your network infrastructure without worrying about complex configurations or difficult networking concepts.
• Enhanced security: Security is a top priority for any Kubernetes and container environment, and Calico provides the tools you need to keep your applications safe. With Calico, you can enforce network policies, protect against DDoS attacks, and more.
• Scalability: Whether you’re running a small Kubernetes cluster or a large-scale deployment, Calico can scale to meet your needs.
• Open-source community: Built on open-source technologies, Project Calico Continue reading

High throughput Kubernetes cluster networking with the Calico/VPP dataplane and accelerated memif

What’s Continue reading

Calico Open Source 2022 highlights

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.

New version releases

Project Calico is maintained by Tigera’s engineering team who are dedicated to adding new features, fixing bugs, and improving the user experience. Based on the feedback and support our team has received from the community, they have successfully released three new versions of Calico in the past year: v3.22, v3.23, and v3.24.

V3.22 (January 28th 2022)

• Project Calico is now only a single directory, making it easier for contributors to add their changes
• Ability to convert Kubernetes NetworkPolicy objects into Calico NetworkPolicies

V3.23 (May 9th 2022)

• Added IPv6 VXLAN support
• Added VPP dataplane beta
• Added Calico networking support in AKS
• BGP enhancements
• Added container storage interface (CSI) support
• Added Windows HostProcess containers support (tech preview)

V3.24 (August 18th 2022)

• Added IPv6 WireGuard support
• Added IPAM API enhancements
• More operator installation configuration options
• Added ability to split IP pools
• Transitioned from pod security policies to pod security standards

Calico education and training

The newest addition to our Continue reading

Community Spotlight series: Calico Open Source user insights from Sr. Software Developer, Burak Tahtacıoğlu

In this issue of the Calico Community Spotlight series, I’ve asked Burak Tahtacioglu from ParkLab Technology to share his experience with Kubernetes and Calico Open Source.  Let’s take a look at how Burak started his Kubernetes journey, and the insights he gained from Calico Open Source.

Q: Please tell us a little bit about yourself, including where you currently work and what you do there. 

I am a Sr. Software Developer in our Developer Experience team. I’m in charge of a team that maintains the core infrastructure, which includes the Kubernetes clusters we run. We also have the base CNI of the clusters. I am mainly responsible for Kubernetes processes, Istio service mesh, and Apache APISIX API Gateway processes of scaled applications.

Q: What orchestrator(s) have you been using?

Kubernetes.

Q: What cloud infrastructure(s) has been a part of your projects?

Amazon EKS and RKE.

Q: There are many people who are just getting started with Kubernetes and might have a lot of questions. Could you please talk a little bit about your own journey?

I first used container (LXC) processes in my development environment and applied them to the applications I was consulting. Then I started my Continue reading

Community Spotlight series: Calico Open Source user insights from Cloud Native Technologist, Jintao Zhang

In this issue of the Calico Community Spotlight series, I’ve asked Jintao Zhang from API7.ai to share his experience with Kubernetes and Calico Open Source. API7.ai is an open-source infrastructure software company that helps businesses manage and visualize business-critical traffic, such as APIs and microservices to accelerate business decisions through data. They have built API7 Cloud—an any-cloud, multi-location SaaS ​platform for deploying, controlling, visualizing, and monitoring APIs at scale. It allows users to manage and run their APIs anywhere in one place and increase runtime effortlessly, without worrying about the control plane. Let’s take a look at how Jintao started his Kubernetes journey, and the insights he gained from Calico Open Source.

Q: Please tell us a little bit about yourself, including where you currently work and what you do there.

I am currently working for API7.ai and my title is Cloud Native Technologist. I am mainly responsible for the Apache APISIX Ingress controller project and the service mesh project based on Apache APISIX.

Q: What orchestrator(s) have you been using?

Kubernetes.

Q: What cloud infrastructure(s) has been a part of your projects?

AWS (EKS) and Azure (AKS).

Q: There are many people who are just getting Continue reading

Introducing our brand new (and free!) Calico Azure Course

Calico Open Source is an industry standard for container security and networking that offers high-performance cloud-native scalability and supports Kubernetes workloads, non-Kubernetes workloads, and legacy workloads. Created and maintained by Tigera, Calico Open Source offers a wide range of support for your choice of data plane whether it’s Windows, eBPF, Linux, or VPP.

We’re excited to announce our new certification course for Azure, Certified Calico Operator: Azure Expert! This free, self-paced course is the latest in our series of four courses. If you haven’t had a chance to complete our previous courses, I highly recommend enrolling in them in the following order (or as you prefer).

1. Certified Calico Operator: Level 1
2. Certified Calico Operator: AWS Expert
3. Certified Calico Operator: eBPF

What will you gain from this course?

Whether you have little to no experience with cloud concepts, have entry-level DevOps and engineering experience, are keen to learn more about Azure or are already an Azure expert looking for a cloud networking and security solution, you will benefit from this course.

The course provides an introduction to Azure cloud, learnings about managed, self-managed and hybrid cluster deployment using Calico in Azure, and offers hands-on labs to help you explore most of Continue reading

Community Spotlight series: Calico Open Source user insights from Ana Shmygla and Josef Janda, Jamf

In this installment of the Calico Community Spotlight series, I interviewed Ana Shmyglya and Josef Janda, who both work for Jamf. Last year, Josef wrote Migrating CNI plugin from kube-router to Calico on Kops managed Kubernetes cluster, and I wanted to dive deeper into his and Ana’s experience based on that blog post. We mainly talked about their respective teams, their responsibilities, and the challenges they have faced whilst using Kubernetes.

Q: What are your current roles and primary responsibilities?

Ana: I work in the Platform team. This basically means I am responsible for a team that maintains the core infrastructure, which includes the Kubernetes clusters that we run. We also own the underlying CNI of the clusters.

Josef: I work as a DevOps engineer on the team that maintains the internal development tools and other systems connected to the software delivery life cycle process.

Q: What orchestrator(s) have you been using?

Josef: We use Kubernetes. That’s basically the only orchestrator in our company.

Ana: Same for us as well, it’s Kubernetes across the company.

Q: What cloud infrastructure(s) has been part of your projects?

Ana: We use a couple of different providers, including AWS, but we only run Continue reading

Community Spotlight series: Calico Open Source user insights from cloud solutions architect, Geoff Burke

In the first installment of our Community Spotlight series, I asked Geoff Burke from Tsunati to share his experience with Kubernetes and Calico Open Source. Geoff talks about how he got started with Kubernetes, the challenges that led him to search for a Container Network Interface (CNI), and why he has chosen Calico Open Source as his preferred CNI.

If you are just getting started with Kubernetes and curious about where other people start their journey, this blog post provides valuable insight and information.

Q: Please tell us a little bit about yourself, including where you currently work and what you do there.

I’m currently a senior cloud solutions architect at Tsunati. We are a data protection company and we focus on backup and recovery, mainly trying to help service providers enhance their services. We have a lot of virtualization expertise. In fact, I am a Veeam legend and a Veeam Vanguard. I also work quite intensely with Kasten by Veeam, which is a Kubernetes-native backup and recovery migration application.

Q: There are many people who are just getting started with Kubernetes and might have a lot of questions. Could you please talk a little bit about your own journey?

Continue reading

Introducing our exciting new ambassador program: Calico Big Cats

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. Our engineering team is committed to maintaining Calico Open Source as the leading standard for container and Kubernetes networking and security!

Given our community’s passion for Project Calico, we wanted to give its members a chance to inspire others by telling their stories. To this end, we are very excited to announce our new Calico Big Cats ambassador program!

What is Calico Big Cats?

Calico Big Cats is an ambassador program that provides a platform for our community to talk about their experiences with Calico. The goal is to help community members connect, inspire, and share common challenges and ways to overcome these challenges using Calico and other tools.

Why join Calico Big Cats?

If you have experience with Project Calico, recognize its value in the open-source networking and security domain, and are passionate about sharing Continue reading