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Managing Kubernetes traffic is complex, and traditional approaches require organizations to deploy multiple, disparate technologies. This fragmented approach creates challenges for security and IT teams, adding complexities to monitoring network activity, troubleshooting performance issues, and enforcing security policies. Tigera’s latest enhancements combat this challenge, extending the solution’s existing networking and security capabilities to ingress traffic and introducing new dashboards that provide teams with enhanced visibility into critical security and networking data without relying on external tools.

Calico Delivers Advanced Ingress Functionality Leveraging Kubernetes Gateway API

As Kubernetes applications scale, the control of external traffic entering a cluster is paramount. Legacy ingress solutions are prone to operational inefficiencies, have limited traffic control features, and can be difficult to customize, often causing performance, visibility and security inconsistencies across an organization’s environments.

To address such complexities, Tigera has introduced Calico Ingress Gateway, a 100% upstream distribution of Envoy gateway, hardened for enterprise use. Calico Ingress Gateway provides a standardized, vendor-neutral approach to ingress management, and delivers more functionality than traditional ingress controllers. By consolidating ingress management with Calico’s networking and security capabilities, Calico simplifies operations, enhances security, and provides deep visibility for all types of Kubernetes traffic.

Calico Ingress Gateway offers unmatched flexibility and functionality including:

Gateway API Support: The Calico Ingress Gateway is an enterprise hardened, 100% upstream distribution of the Envoy Gateway.
Advanced Traffic Control: Calico supports header-based routing, traffic shaping, retries, fault injection, and rate limiting, giving teams fine-grained control over ingress traffic.
Integrated Load Balancing: The Calico Ingress Gateway ensures even distribution of incoming traffic, reducing latency and improving application reliability.
Role Orientation: The solution’s role-oriented implementation allows administrators to handle cluster-wide ingress configurations while empowering developers to manage application-specific routing rules.

Calico Dashboards Deliver Centralized Visibility of Network Traffic

Maintaining strong observability is crucial for Kubernetes security and operations. Without centralized, actionable dashboards, organizations may be impacted by slower incident response timelines and a weaker security posture.

To bridge this gap, Tigera has introduced Calico Dashboards to simplify monitoring and policy management. The dashboards provide real-time visibility into network traffic and enable teams to monitor, diagnose, and troubleshoot connectivity issues. The dashboards also allow users to create and refine policies before enforcement to reduce misconfiguration risk, and can identify latency issues for troubleshooting and improved application performance.

The latest enhancements to Calico also include additional functionality such as:

Control Plane Label Customization on AKS Clusters: Calico’s control-plane label customization feature now allows users to choose how labels are applied during Calico installation on AKS. Users can opt for the default labeling scheme, or select an alternative option to exclude the control-plane label.
Support for Service LoadBalancer Address Allocation: Calico’s extended IPAM capabilities now include the management of service LoadBalancer IPs, providing a centralized solution for Kubernetes clusters. This enhancement ensures seamless interoperability with MetalLB as well as native LoadBalancer services from major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.