Announcing Calico v1.0

After months of hard work, the Project Calico team are proud to announce our milestone release of Calico v1.0, complete with OpenStack integration.

While we’ve had plenty of people trialling Calico over the past few months, this milestone marks the point where we’re confident that Calico is ready for prime time deployment. The highlights for this release include:

• A virtualized layer 3 networking solution for VM and container workloads.
• Fully deployable integration with OpenStack Neutron, supporting multiple Neutron servers and API threads, as well as live migration of VMs.
• Proof of Concept level integrations with leading container management and orchestration systems, such as Docker, Kubernetes, and others.
• Support for IPv4 and IPv6 workloads.
• Flexible security policy through whitelists for permitted traffic with integration into OpenStack’s configured security groups.
• Control plane graceful restart without impacting the data plane – you can restart the Calico agent, Neutron plugin and BGP client without affecting the flow of data between your workloads.

While these features have been present in Calico for a while, we’ve been particularly focusing on testing over the past few months to ensure Calico is deployable at scale. Over the coming weeks we’ll be writing blog posts detailing the scale testing we’ve been doing, but today I’m pleased to say that we’ve hit the following headlines in our testing:

• A Calico based OpenStack cluster of 10,000 VMs running across 500 compute hosts.
• A container deployment of Calico running up to 50,000 containers across 500 hosts with set-up rates of over 20 containers per second.
• Throughput tests on a 10-Gigabit network showing throughput with Calico networked VMs at near 100% of bare metal speeds, performance unsurpassed by any other virtual networking technologies.

This release is available to try today with OpenStack using either our

• packaged installations on Ubuntu 14.04 and RHEL 7 for OpenStack Icehouse, Juno and Kilo
• Mirantis Fuel 6.1 integration
• Chef based install for Ubuntu 14.04.

To start using Calico v1.0 with OpenStack, see our documentation on http://docs.projectcalico.org/en/latest/openstack.html.  

If you’re a container user, then the same core Calico v1.0 code is used in each of our demonstration integrations with Docker and Kubernetes – see http://github.com/projectcalico/calico-docker for more details.

Now this milestone is behind us, we’ve exciting plans for moving Calico forward, with more features and integrations in the pipeline. We’ll provide more information on these plans in the blog over the next few weeks and months.