Community Spotlight series: Calico Open Source user insights from Saurabh Mishra

In this issue of the Calico Community Spotlight series, I’ve asked Saurabh Mishra from Vodafone to share his experience with Kubernetes and Calico Open Source. Let’s take a look at how Saurabh started his Kubernetes journey and the insights he gained from Calico Open Source.

Q: Please tell us a little bit about yourself, including where you currently work and what you do there. 

I am working as a DevOps Manager with Vodafone Group. I am responsible for managing Kubernetes and cloud-based environments. I’m particularly interested in all things related to cloud, automation, machine learning, and DevOps.

Q: What orchestrator(s) have you been using?

Kubernetes.

Q: What cloud infrastructure(s) has been a part of your projects?

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Q: There are many people who are just getting started with Kubernetes and might have a lot of questions. Could you please talk a little bit about your own journey?

Kubernetes is a fully open-source project. It’s purposely designed this way so it can work with other open-source tools to create continuous improvements and innovations.  In our team, we are using Kubernetes in non-production and production environments to run and manage critical workloads.

Q: What were some of the challenges that led you to search for a CNI?

Traditional networking approaches are not very compatible with Kubernetes in terms of multi-tenancy and when multiple workloads share resources. There are also challenges with static IP addresses and ports on Kubernetes.

Q: Could you provide some details about this technical problem, whether it’s security, compliance, or troubleshooting?

Configuring and defining network policies for various applications is often challenging. I’ve been working on restructuring an existing data center based onas per the Kubernetes and container-based application architectures.

Q: How did you come across Calico? What stood out about Calico for your needs? 

I came across Calico through various tech community summits such as KubeCon. Calico is one of the most powerful Kubernetes CNI frameworks that simplify network security solutions with performance and security. It also supports different types of overlay networking.

Q: How would you describe your use case? 

We are running shared applications across Kubernetes extensively, and CNI helps to define how plugins should communicate and interoperate during container runtime for cluster networking. Specifically, we are running Calico on new application deployments, both on the cloud and on-prem, and for facilitating multi-cloud deployment.

Q: Are there any significant metrics around this project that you can share? 

Although there have been no changes in headcount, we simplified and automated the process of managing Kubernetes networking.

Calico is a one-stop solution for Kubernetes networking to run multi-cluster environments securely and efficiently. Calico removes network complexities and provides a simple network policy with a zero-trust networking approach. It also supports different types of overlay networking

Q:  Do you have any feedback for the Project Calico community about Calico resources?

We have been enjoying great and continuous support from the community in terms of Kubernetes network problem-solving through various channels.

Get started with Calico Open Source by reading through Calico docs. You can also reach us at [email protected] for collaboration ideas.