Why we need a unified approach to Kubernetes environments

Today, organizations struggle managing disparate technologies for their Kubernetes networking and network security needs. Leveraging multiple technologies for networking and security for in-cluster, ingress, egress, and traffic across clusters creates challenges, including operational complexities and increased costs. For example, to manage ingress traffic for Kubernetes clusters, users cobble together multiple solutions from different providers such as ingress controllers or gateways and load balancers for routing traffic, as well as Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) for enhanced security.

Despite the challenges it brings, deploying disparate technologies has been a “necessary evil” for organizations to get all the capabilities needed for holistic Kubernetes networking. Here, we’ll explore challenges this proliferation of tooling introduces, and provide actionable tips for today’s platform and security teams to overcome these issues.

Challenges Managing Multiple Technologies

The fragmented approach to networking and network security in Kubernetes leads to challenges and inefficiencies, including:

• Operational overhead: Each technology comes with its own learning curve, setup, configuration, integration, and maintenance requirements. This leads to a challenging user experience.
• Increased costs: Licensing and operational costs accumulate as more tools are deployed.
• Scaling challenges: As clusters grow or spread across diverse environments, ensuring consistent and secure networking becomes harder.
• Security gaps: Disjointed solutions Continue reading

Calico WireGuard support with Azure CNI

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.

What is WireGuard?

WireGuard is a VPN technology available in the Linux kernel since version 5.6 and is positioned as an alternative to IPsec and OpenVPN. It aims to be faster, simpler, leaner and more useful. This is manifested in WireGuard taking an opinionated stance on the configurability of supported ciphers and algorithms to reduce the attack surface and auditability of the technology. It is simple to configure with standard Linux networking commands, and it is only approximately 4,000 lines of code, making it easy to read, understand, and audit.

While WireGuard is a VPN technology and is typically thought of as client/server, it can be configured and used equally effectively in a peer-to-peer mesh architecture, which is how we designed our solution at Tigera to work in Kubernetes. Using Calico, Continue reading