--- title: "Calico is celebrating 5 years" source: "https://www.tigera.io/blog/calico-is-celebrating-5-years/" --- [Company Blog](https://www.tigera.io/category/company-blog/) # Calico is celebrating 5 years By [Laura Ferguson](https://www.tigera.io/blog/author/laura-ferguson/) on Oct 29, 2021 • 2 min read October marks the five-year anniversary of Calico Open Source, the most widely adopted solution for container networking and security. Calico Open Source was born out of Project Calico, an open-source project with an active development and user community, and has grown to power 1.5M+ nodes daily across 166 countries. When Calico was introduced 5 years ago, the world—and technology—was much different from what it is today. The march toward distributed applications and microservices had just begun. Today, open-source projects like Project Calico are enabling the large-scale adoption of a modern architecture that is ultimately responsible for the wholesale transition to digital transformations that we are witnessing. As part of our celebration, we’ve compiled a few comments from people who have worked on the project over the years. “Calico works well out of the box. It scales well, rarely has bugs, and is feature rich. Tigera does a good job supporting its customers also.” —Network engineer “[Calico is] the industry standard [for] networking for Kubernetes.” —Platform engineer “The support for a lot of K8s distributions (either on-prem or cloud managed) is great with Calico.” —Platform architect “[Calico helped us learn] about network segmentation in cloud-native environments.” —Product Line Manager “Calico Open Source is a great plugin for Kubernetes/Openshift” —Network engineer Both Project Calico and Calico Open Source are what they are today thanks to more than 200 contributors across a broad range of companies worldwide. Thank you to everyone who is or has been a part of this community. We look forward to having you continue this journey with us!   ***Tune into a special episode of [Calico Live](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9ARoBQmaEc), where we celebrate the five-year anniversary of Calico Open Source by chatting with Ratan Tipirneni, President & CEO at Tigera, about Calico’s journey and what’s in store for the future.*** ***![Calico cat cartoon with a birthday cake and the number 5, celebrating #ProjectCalicois5. Tigera logo at the top](https://www.tigera.io/app/uploads/2021/10/tigera-sticker-calico-5th-bd-V5-300x300.png)***   [Open Source](https://www.tigera.io/tags/open-source/)[Project Calico](https://www.tigera.io/tags/project-calico/)[Announcements](https://www.tigera.io/tags/announcements/) ## Related posts [![Meet Mylo: An AI-native way to work with Calico](https://www.tigera.io/app/uploads/2026/09/Meet-Mylo-An-AI-native-way-to-work-with-Calico.png)](https://www.tigera.io/blog/meet-mylo-an-ai-native-way-to-work-with-calico/) [Technical Blog](https://www.tigera.io/category/technical-blog/) #### [Meet Mylo: An AI-native way to work with Calico](https://www.tigera.io/blog/meet-mylo-an-ai-native-way-to-work-with-calico/) By [Phil DiCorpo](https://www.tigera.io/blog/author/phil-dicorpo/) on Sep 3, 2026 A library of Calico tools and skills — delivered through the Calico MCP Server What if your hardest network question took ten minutes instead of ten days? Anyone who has operated Kubernetes networking at scale... [Read more](https://www.tigera.io/blog/meet-mylo-an-ai-native-way-to-work-with-calico/) [![Why We Built Lynx: Bringing Control to the Age of AI Agents](https://www.tigera.io/app/uploads/2026/06/Introducing-Lynx-NEW-TEMPLATE-2026-Tigera-brand.png)](https://www.tigera.io/blog/why-we-built-lynx-bringing-control-to-the-age-of-ai-agents/) #### [Why We Built Lynx: Bringing Control to the Age of AI Agents](https://www.tigera.io/blog/why-we-built-lynx-bringing-control-to-the-age-of-ai-agents/) By [Ratan Tipirneni](https://www.tigera.io/blog/author/ratan/) on Jun 17, 2026 For a decade, one idea has guided everything we’ve built at Tigera: How do you secure a dynamic system with a lot of moving parts that is changing rapidly, with a programmatic approach? Calico has... [Read more](https://www.tigera.io/blog/why-we-built-lynx-bringing-control-to-the-age-of-ai-agents/) [![What’s new in Calico: Spring 2026 Release](https://www.tigera.io/app/uploads/2026/06/Whats-New-in-Calico-NEW-TEMPLATE-2026.png)](https://www.tigera.io/blog/whats-new-in-calico-spring-2026-release/) #### [What’s new in Calico: Spring 2026 Release](https://www.tigera.io/blog/whats-new-in-calico-spring-2026-release/) By [Veronika Smolik](https://www.tigera.io/blog/author/veronika-smolik/) on Jun 2, 2026 Kubernetes has come a long way since its debut in 2014. It’s gone from running a couple of containerized microservices to orchestrating fleets of production workloads spanning everything from AI agents to full scale VMs... [Read more](https://www.tigera.io/blog/whats-new-in-calico-spring-2026-release/)