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Tigera Enhances Calico’s Cluster Mesh Capabilities
December 2022 by Marc Jacob
Tigera announced enhancements to its cluster mesh capabilities for managing multi-cluster environments with
Calico. As large and leading-edge enterprises accelerate deployments to enhance their services at scale, they have encountered management challenges that can put their environments at risk. Calico provides an operationally simple solution to create a Kubernetes
cluster mesh to ensure enterprise infrastructure can run multi-cluster environments efficiently, securely, and compliantly – no matter its complexity.
Organizations increasingly rely on multiple clusters for reasons ranging from high availability, disaster recovery, and application isolation, to phased upgrades and migration. However, the introduction
of additional clusters also brings an entirely new set of security challenges for enterprises. Because Kubernetes does not natively support inter-cluster communication, it is difficult to manage basic environment functions such as service discovery, observability,
compliance, and network and security policy control.
Calico addresses these issues by providing a centralized multi-cluster management plane to enable security, observability, and networking management across multiple clusters in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Calico brings the same capabilities expected from single cluster environments to those with multiple clusters, enabling Calico to scale to any enterprise’s needs. The Calico Service Mesh offers significant advantages for multi-cluster environments, including:
Unified security policy controls:
Complex digital transformation initiatives have led to phased infrastructure modernization, and it is common for legacy services on VMs and hosts to run alongside modern microservices in containers. Calico provides a unified
policy framework that works across bare metal, hosts, VMs, and containers to enable legacy and modern environments to co-exist seamlessly.
Unified network security management: Calico provides capabilities to manage network security across all Kubernetes clusters. These include
centralized logins, points of control, log management, troubleshooting tools, storage management, compliance reporting and more.
Federation:
Calico enables users to create policies in one cluster that reference pods in another cluster using federated identity. Federated services further provide service discovery of remote pods in another cluster. With these two
features, users can regain control of multi-cluster security through fine-grained controls across endpoints, tiers, and both remote and local microservices.
Observability and troubleshooting:
Calico offers visibility into service-to-service communication in a resource-efficient and cost-effective way through Kubernetes-native Dynamic Service and Threat Graph visualizations. No matter which data plane a team uses
(standard Linux iptables, Windows, or eBPF), Calico provides observability, traffic flow management, and control.
Encryption and Zero Trust:
Calico leverages the latest in crypto technology to offer encryption for data in transit. As a result, Calico’s encryption provides robust security while also allowing visibility into workload communication. Further, Calico’s
advanced zero-trust security policy engine reduces the application’s attack surface through machine learning that combats runtime security risks from known and zero-day threats by prioritizing and mitigating the risks from vulnerabilities through security
policy changes.
Calico is supported across all major cloud providers and Kubernetes distributions, empowering industry-leading companies to operate at scale with the security solutions they need to keep pace with modern
innovations.
