Tigera is pleased to announce that we have open-sourced Calico for Windows and made it immediately available for all to use for free. With the launch of open-source Calico for Windows, the vast ecosystem of Windows users now has unprecedented access to Kubernetes via the industry’s de-facto standard for Kubernetes networking and network security.
We have been collaborating with Microsoft and our joint customers over the past few years to bring Project Calico to the Windows platform, and have seen increasing demand for Windows nodes ever since the release of Kubernetes 1.14. Most enterprises have a Windows footprint, and Windows workloads are increasingly being modernized and migrated to containers and orchestrated with Kubernetes. Enterprise users want to deploy a single solution for network security that works across both Linux and Windows workloads. Open-sourcing Calico for Windows provides those users with the best and only solution available, and for free.
“We are seeing an influx in interest in Windows Kubernetes workloads, as well as interest in securing those workloads. Calico has been a key means of deploying network security policies across both Windows and Linux platforms, however, their Windows support has been commercially licensed by Tigera until today,“ said Ravi Rao, Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft. “With this announcement, users can begin to adopt a single tried and proven open-source security solution across their choice of Windows, Linux, and mixed-node environments”
While Calico is currently the most widely deployed Kubernetes network security solution, thousands of our users want to be sure that choosing Calico is the right decision for many years to come. Calico is the only solution that offers a pluggable data plane supporting Linux, eBPF for modern Linux kernels, and Windows; future-proofing their decision to go with Calico.
“Project Calico is the de facto standard for network policy in Kubernetes, which is why we included it out of the box when we launched AKS in 2018,” said Sean McKenna, Principal Lead Program Manager for Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS). “Tigera’s decision to open-source Calico for Windows enables all Azure customers who are interested in Windows to extend this simple yet powerful network security model to their clusters.”
Calico is the only cross-platform container network interface (CNI) and Network Policy engine available today and currently powers more than 200,000 known clusters across over a million nodes in 166 countries worldwide. Many organizations have .NET and windows workloads that they are or will eventually modernize and deploy to Kubernetes.
Calico originated on Linux and performs two key functions: Network connectivity for dynamic workload endpoints, and security policy applied to those network connections. Calico is the industry’s de-facto standard for Kubernetes networking and network security, having been integrated into all major Kubernetes distributions including offerings from AWS, Docker, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Rancher, and Nutanix. Every day, more than 200,000 Calico-based Kubernetes clusters are operational in the world’s largest production Kubernetes clusters, and we will expand our footprint into the market for Windows nodes.
Calico for Windows has been running in production at several large enterprises for the past couple of years and is ready for your production environment, just like Calico for Linux has been for many years.
Learn more…
- Read what Microsoft has to say about Calico for Windows
- Read the Microsoft Open Source Blog
- Watch the On-demand Calico for Windows Training Video
- Check out the Calico for Windows Quickstart Guide
- Review the Calico 3.16 Release Notes
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