Integrating Calico statistics with Prometheus

Metrics are important for a microservices application running on Kubernetes because they provide visibility into the health and performance of the application. This visibility can be used to troubleshoot problems, optimize the application, and ensure that it is meeting its SLAs.

Some of the challenges that metrics solve for microservices applications running on Kubernetes include:

• Visibility: Microservices applications are typically composed of many small, independent services. This can make it difficult to get a clear picture of the overall health and performance of the application. Metrics provide a way to aggregate data from all of the services, giving you a single view of the application.
• Troubleshooting: When something goes wrong with a microservices application, it can be difficult to identify the root cause of the problem. Metrics can help you to track down the problem by providing information about the state of the application at the time of the failure.
• Optimization: Metrics can be used to optimize the performance of a microservices application. By tracking metrics such as CPU usage, memory usage, and network traffic, you can identify areas where the application can be improved.
• SLAs: Many microservices applications have SLAs that they must meet. Metrics can be used to Continue reading

Make your FortiGate firewalls work with Kubernetes: How Calico enables Fortinet firewalls to secure Kubernetes workloads

FortiGate firewalls are highly popular and extensively utilized for perimeter-based security in a wide range of applications, including monolithic applications developed and deployed using the traditional waterfall model. These firewalls establish a secure perimeter around applications, effectively managing inbound and outbound traffic for the organization. FortiGate relies on IP addresses for implementing “allow/deny” policies.

The use of IP addresses is effective for non-cloud native applications, where static IP addresses serve as definitive network identifiers. However, in a Kubernetes environment, workloads have dynamic IP addresses that change whenever they are restarted or scaled out to different nodes. This dynamic nature poses challenges when utilizing FortiGate with Kubernetes workloads, requiring continuous updates to firewall rules and the opening of large CIDR ranges for node-based access. This introduces security and compliance risks, as workloads running on these CIDR ranges gain unrestricted access to external or public services.

To facilitate the usage of FortiGate firewalls with Kubernetes workloads, it becomes crucial to identify workloads that necessitate access to external resources and assign them fixed IP addresses for utilization in FortiGate firewall rules. The integration of Calico with FortiGate firewalls and FortiManager offers an elegant solution, enabling the use of FortiGate firewalls while retaining existing Continue reading

How to integrate Calico Image Scanner with Argo CI/CD

In today’s fast-paced software development environment, developers often use common public libraries and modules to quickly build applications. However, this presents a significant challenge for DevOps teams who must ensure that these applications are safe to use. As organizations move towards dynamic models of software development that rely on Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, the responsibility for deploying secure applications has shifted from traditional security teams to development teams.

To address this challenge, I will provide general guidelines on how to integrate the Calico Image Scanning feature into a CI/CD pipeline, using Argo. This will help ensure that images are built safely and free from Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). In this blog post, we will use a Kubernetes validating webhook configuration to attach a Calico Cloud admission controller that can accept or reject certain actions on resources, such as the creation of pods. This will prevent the deployment of images that contain known CVEs, thus strengthening the overall security of your software development process.

Overall Architecture

The building blocks to use Argo as an example of this integration are below:

Relevant Calico configuration

Before even committing changes to our application, we must setup the Calico Admission Controller within our Continue reading