A Detailed Look at the Calico Ingress Gateway

Managing traffic in Kubernetes environments presents serious security and operational challenges. Traditional ingress solutions lack flexibility, rely on proprietary configurations, and offer limited traffic control, creating security gaps and inefficiencies.

What’s needed is a more flexible, scalable, and policy-driven approach to ingress traffic management. Enter Calico Ingress Gateway—built to eliminate these limitations while enhancing security, visibility, and control over ingress traffic at scale.

So Why an Ingress Gateway?

An ingress gateway serves as the first point of contact for external traffic entering a Kubernetes cluster. For most modern applications, this traffic includes API requests, user connections, or service calls, all of which need to be routed to the appropriate workloads securely and efficiently. Without a robust ingress solution, organizations face a range of challenges:

• Customization Challenges: Legacy ingress solutions provide limited flexibility, frequently requiring custom annotations to extend functionality, which increases the time and complexity of implementations.
• Operational Complexity: Traditional ingress controllers often rely on proprietary configurations, making deployments harder to manage and less portable across environments.
• Limited Traffic Control: Basic ingress controllers lack some of the advanced features needed to manage, shape, and secure traffic effectively.

What is the Calico Ingress Gateway?

The Calico Ingress Gateway is a 100% Continue reading

How Calico Network Security Works

In the rapidly evolving world of Kubernetes, network security remains one of the most challenging aspects for organizations. The shift to dynamic containerized environments brings challenges like inter-cluster communication, rapid scaling, and multi-cloud deployments. These challenges, compounded by tool sprawl and fragmented visibility, leave teams grappling with operational inefficiencies, misaligned priorities, and increasing vulnerabilities. Without a unified solution, organizations risk security breaches and compliance failures.

Calico reimagines Kubernetes security with a holistic, end-to-end approach that simplifies operations while strengthening defenses. By unifying key capabilities like ingress and egress gateways, microsegmentation, and real-time observability, Calico empowers teams to bridge the gaps between security, compliance, and operational efficiency. The result is a scalable, robust platform that addresses the unique demands of containerized environments without introducing unnecessary complexity. Let’s look at how Calico’s key network security capabilities make this possible.

Calico Ingress Gateway

The Calico Ingress Gateway is a Kubernetes-native solution, built on the Envoy Gateway, that serves as a centralized entry point for managing and securing incoming traffic to your clusters. Implementing the Kubernetes Gateway API specification, it replaces traditional ingress controllers with a more robust, scalable, and flexible architecture that is capable of more Continue reading

What’s New in Calico: Winter 2025

As we kick off the new year, we’re excited to introduce the latest updates to Calico, designed to create a single, unified platform for all your Kubernetes networking, security, and observability needs. These new features help organizations reduce tool sprawl, streamline operations, and lower costs, making it more convenient and efficient to manage Kubernetes environments.

In this blog, we’ll highlight some of the most exciting additions that include a major new product capability, an ingress gateway.

Introducing the Calico Ingress Gateway

Managing and securing traffic in Kubernetes environments is one of the most complex and critical challenges organizations face today. With more than 60% of enterprises having adopted Kubernetes, according to an annual CNCF survey, controlling and optimizing how external traffic enters clusters is more important than ever. As applications grow in scale and complexity, legacy ingress solutions often fall short, plagued by operational inefficiencies, reliance on proprietary APIs, limited scalability, and difficulty in customization. These limitations make it difficult for teams to maintain consistent performance and robust security across their environments.

To address these challenges, we’re excited to introduce the Calico Ingress Gateway, an enterprise hardened, 100% upstream distribution of Envoy Gateway that leverages and expands the Continue reading

How Calico Network Threat Detection Works

In today’s cloud-native environments, network security is more complex than ever, with Kubernetes and containerized workloads introducing unique challenges. Traditional tools struggle to monitor and secure these dynamic, interconnected systems, leaving organizations vulnerable to advanced threats, such as lateral movement, zero-day exploits, ransomware, data exfiltration, and more.

Network threat detection identifies malicious or suspicious activity within network traffic by using rules and analyzing patterns, behaviors, and anomalies. It enables organizations to spot attacks early, respond quickly, and mitigate risks before they escalate. Tools like Calico are specifically designed to address these challenges in Kubernetes, offering visibility, detection, and automated responses to protect workloads from known and emerging threats.

Calico delivers advanced network threat detection for Kubernetes environments, leveraging a variety of techniques to ensure comprehensive protection. Here are the key features of Calico’s network threat detection.

Behavior-based detection

Calico uses machine learning algorithms to establish a baseline of normal network behavior and detect anomalies such as port scans, IP (Internet Protocol) sweeps, and domain generation algorithms (DGA), which are commonly used by malware to evade detection and maintain communication with command and control (C2) servers.

Calico’s anomaly detection capability evaluates traffic flows using machine learning to identify the baseline behavior Continue reading

How Kubernetes Simplifies Configuration Security

This is the second blog post in a series exploring how Kubernetes, despite its inherent complexity, provides features that simplify security efforts.

Kubernetes presents an interesting paradox: while it is complex, it simplifies many aspects of deploying and managing containerized applications, including configuration security. Once you navigate its learning curve, Kubernetes unlocks powerful capabilities and tool support that make managing configuration security significantly easier.

In this blog post, we’ll dive into how Kubernetes enhances configuration security and outline its key advantages.

How Kubernetes Can Help Improve and Simplify Configuration Security

Despite its complexity, Kubernetes offers a range of features that simplify configuration security. These include enhanced visibility, streamlined access to log data, robust RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) capabilities, security policy as code, a layered network policy model, and more. Many of these capabilities also improve the efficiency and effectiveness of mitigation and remediation workflows for configuration security. Below, we highlight key features that should be considered when developing a configuration security strategy.

100% Inventory

Maintaining a complete inventory of workloads can be challenging in non-Kubernetes environments. However, Kubernetes provides complete visibility into every containerized workload running in the system. This eliminates concerns about shadow systems or overlooked resources that could Continue reading