Tigera Calico Policy Generally Available on Amazon EKS

Tigera’s dedication and investment in the open source Project Calico has helped thousands of users implement best practices network policy in Kubernetes — many of them deployed in Amazon Web Services infrastructure. AWS announced today that Amazon EKS is now generally available, with support for Calico policy out-of-the-box. This is very exciting news for both Tigera and the Calico Community.

If you are interested in a live demo of Calico Policy in EKS, join us at the live EKoSystem Day on June 11 from 10:00 am – 8:00 pm. You can register here: http://ekosystemdaysanfranciscojune2018.splashthat.com. The event will also be streamed via Twitch, register here: http://ekosystemdaylivestreamjune2018.splashthat.com.

Microservices require advanced orchestration capabilities to operate in a highly-available production environment, and while Tigera and Calico support many orchestrators, Kubernetes is the most-popular choice among our users.

Open source technology does not come without trade-offs. While both the Kubernetes and Calico communities are vibrant, active, and helpful; many organizations are looking for a faster and easier way to deploy their applications without worrying about infrastructure management and upkeep, or the steep learning curve it takes to master administration of this next-gen infrastructure. Amazon EKS is a perfect fit for these users – AWS takes on the administrative burden and lets you focus on deploying your applications on top of trusted infrastructure.

Our partnership with Amazon Web Services enables users to deploy applications to Amazon EKS with production-grade network security. Calico Policy enables microsegmentation of container-to-container connectivity, and this is provided completely free of charge, as part of the service.

You might have noticed in a previous blog post that we announced our collaboration with AWS on this venture, 6 months ago. Since that post, we have worked with many joint customers (thank you!) to build references and case studies that are required to become an AWS Advanced Technology Partner. We could not have achieved this without the backing of you, our Project Calico community.

We expect to see a surge in demand for Amazon EKS. We know from working with our users that about half are developers or platform engineers working within a line-of-business to get a specific application deployed, and need to support their Kubernetes environment themselves. We hear from these users that they will be the first to move to EKS. At the same time, we also hear from IT shared services teams that they are evaluating EKS as an option for public cloud Kubernetes, often as part of a hybrid cloud strategy.

To learn more about Calico in EKS, visit the Amazon EKS documentation for Network Policies and, as always, feel free to ping us on the Project Calico Community for help.