Calico Open Source 2022 highlights

2022 has been a year full of new releases, new events, and new projects for Open Source Calico. Let’s take a look at Project Calico’s 2022 highlights and see if you’ve missed any exciting news.

New version releases

Project Calico is maintained by Tigera’s engineering team who are dedicated to adding new features, fixing bugs, and improving the user experience. Based on the feedback and support our team has received from the community, they have successfully released three new versions of Calico in the past year: v3.22, v3.23, and v3.24.

V3.22 (January 28th 2022)

  • Project Calico is now only a single directory, making it easier for contributors to add their changes
  • Ability to convert Kubernetes NetworkPolicy objects into Calico NetworkPolicies

V3.23 (May 9th 2022)

  • Added IPv6 VXLAN support
  • Added VPP dataplane beta
  • Added Calico networking support in AKS
  • BGP enhancements
  • Added container storage interface (CSI) support
  • Added Windows HostProcess containers support (tech preview)

V3.24 (August 18th 2022)

  • Added IPv6 WireGuard support
  • Added IPAM API enhancements
  • More operator installation configuration options
  • Added ability to split IP pools
  • Transitioned from pod security policies to pod security standards

Calico education and training

The newest addition to our series of free, self-paced courses is the Certified Calico operator: Azure Expert! If you are not familiar with the previous courses, I highly recommend enrolling in them in the following order:

  1. Certified Calico Operator: Level 1
  2. Certified Calico Operator: AWS Expert
  3. Certified Calico Operator: eBPF
  4. Certified Calico operator: Azure Expert

The Certified Calico Operator: Azure Expert course introduces Azure cloud, learnings about managed, self-managed, and hybrid cluster deployment using Calico in Azure, and offers hands-on labs to help you explore the features in the Calico–Azure integration. For more information about the course curriculum, check out this blog post on the Calico Azure course.

Calico Community

From KubeCon 2022 to meet-ups, the Calico community has been very active in the past year. With the support of our ambassadors and our team, we were able to collaborate and team up with Calico users all around the world.

Ambassador program and new blog series

In the beginning of 2022, we launched Calico Big Cats, which is an ambassador program created to provide a platform for our community to talk about their experiences with Calico. Since our launch, we have over 60 Big Cats representing Project Calico. We also launched the Community Spotlight series to interview our community members and learn more about their Kubernetes journey. Big shoutout to all our Calico Big Cats and our much-appreciated community for supporting Calico!

Events

We collaborated with multiple meet-up groups that are dedicated to learning about Kubernetes and Kubernetes security. We were also onstage at KubeCon NA 2022 to present Opening the Black Box: Understanding and Troubleshooting Calico’s eBPF Dataplane and became a part of the suggested tools for platform engineers on the Platform Engineers website. And finally, we also hosted CalicoCon and Cloud Native Security Summit 2022, which was filled with open-source user stories from our Calico Big Cats and informative sessions delivered by Tigera partners and customers.

Open source news

Did you know Calico was mentioned in Datadog’s report, “9 insights on real-world container use,” as one of the most popular container images? Calico was described as  “a networking provider that lets administrators manage the security of the network within their Kubernetes clusters.”

Last but not the least, we now have a monthly community digest dedicated to open source news! If you’d like to get updates monthly, then subscribe to the Calico Open Source Community Newsletter.

A big thank-you to our community

2022 has been an impactful year for Project Calico and its community. With the help of our contributors and Calico Big Cats, we’ll continue to grow the project and extend our reach to new collaborations. Thank you, everyone, for supporting us and being a part of the Calico community.

Feel free to take part in our next monthly community meeting, where we discuss the future of Calico Open Source and spotlight community members who might have made some of the favorite features you are currently using.

Want to work on Project Calico? Join the Project Calico contributor Slack channel and share your vision! 

 

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