Boosting your cluster networking with the Calico VPP data plane (beta)!

This is a guest post from Nathan Skrzypczak at Cisco. Nathan is part of a team of external contributors to Calico Open Source that have been working on an integration between Calico Open Source and Cisco’s data plane technology, VPP, for the last year.

Calico v3.23 is out, and with it a lot of new features! This release marks a long-awaited milestone for me and my team, as it includes the Calico VPP data plane (beta). So now seems to be a good time to reflect on what this integration actually is, and why we built it.

The Calico VPP data plane is the fourth data plane option for Calico. Alongside the Linux kernel, eBPF data plane, and Windows kernel, you can now choose to have packet processing done in a userspace network stack: the Vector Packet Processor (VPP). This means the service load-balancing, NAT-ing of packets, encapsulation, encryption and policies will all run in a user-space application. It all seems mostly transparent from the user’s perspective, is seamless to enable, and enabling it allows access to a series of really interesting features.

Quick packets yields more throughput

The first thing the Calico VPP data plane aims to Continue reading

What’s New in Calico v3.20

We’re excited to announce Calico v3.20! Thank you to everyone who contributed to this release! For detailed release notes, please go here. Below are some highlights from the release.

Service-based egress rules

Calico NetworkPolicy and GlobalNetworkPolicy now support egress rules that match on Kubernetes service names. Service matches in egress rules can be used to allow or deny access to in-cluster services, as well as services typically not backed by pods (for example, the Kubernetes API). Address and port information is learned from the individual endpoints within the service, making it easier to keep your network policy in sync with your workloads.

Check out the docs for more!

Golang API

In Calico v3.19, we introduced a tech-preview API server that allows management of Calico resources directly with kubectl. In v3.20, we’re building upon that with a new Golang API for Calico!

Install the API server and import the Golang API to manage Calico network policies and more, in your own applications! See the projectcalico/api repository, which includes an example, and the Go documentation page.

Configurable BGP graceful restart timer

If you’re using BGP in your cluster, the graceful restart timer is used during rolling updates to ensure Continue reading

What’s New in Calico v3.19

We’re excited to announce Calico v3.19.0! This release includes a number of cool new features as well as bug fixes. Thank you to each one of the contributors to this release! For detailed release notes, please go here. Here are some highlights from the release…

VPP Data Plane (tech-preview)

We’re very excited to announce that Calico v3.19 includes tech-preview support for FD.io’s Vector Packet Processing (VPP) data plane, joining Calico’s existing iptables, eBPF, and Windows dataplanes.

The VPP data plane promises high performance Kubernetes networking with support for network policy, encryption via WireGuard or IPSec, and MagLev service load balancing.

Interested? Try it out by following the tech-preview getting started guide!

Resource Management with kubectl (tech-preview)

In previous versions of Calico, the “calicoctl” command line tool was required to properly manage Calico API resources. In Calico v3.19, we’ve introduced a new tech-preview feature that allows you to manage all projectcalico.org API resources directly with kubectl using an optional API server add-on.

Try it out on your cluster by following the guide!

Windows Data Plane Support for containerd

Calico v3.19 introduces support for Calico for Windows users to deploy containers using containerd Continue reading