--- title: "What’s new in Calico v3.18?" source: "https://www.tigera.io/blog/whats-new-in-calico-v3-18/" --- [Technical Blog](https://www.tigera.io/category/technical-blog/) # What’s new in Calico v3.18? By [Casey Davenport](https://www.tigera.io/blog/author/caseydavenport/) on Feb 24, 2021 • 2 min read We’re excited to announce Calico v3.18.0! This release includes a number of cool new features as well as bug fixes. Thank you to each one of the contributors to this release! For detailed release notes, please go [here](https://docs.projectcalico.org/release-notes/). Here are some highlights from the release… ## **Service IP advertisement – improved!** Calico has been capable of advertising Service ClusterIPs and ExternalIPs for some time now, extending Kubernetes service reachability outside of your cluster. Building upon that, Calico v3.18.0 supports [advertising Service LoadBalancer IP addresses](https://docs.tigera.io/archive/v3.18/networking/advertise-service-ips#advertise-service-load-balancer-ip-addresses) as well.  Now you can now use an external IP allocator for LoadBalancer type Services (for example, MetalLB) and Calico will advertise those addresses into your BGP infrastructure so they can be reached by the outside world. In addition to LoadBalancer IP support, Calico now respects the [“node.kubernetes.io/exclude-from-external-load-balancers” label](https://docs.tigera.io/archive/v3.18/networking/advertise-service-ips#exclude-certain-nodes-from-advertisement), which enables control over which nodes in the cluster should advertise service IPs. ## **eBPF data plane support for HostEndpoints** In Calico v3.18.0, the eBPF data plane now provides support for Calico’s host protection capabilities via the use of HostEndpoints and GlobalNetworkPolicy. Normal, pre-DNAT and apply-on-forward policy types are implemented. Untracked policy is not yet implemented.  As part of this effort, we were able to make the upgrade process from iptables to eBPF mode much smoother. Existing connections should no longer be disrupted, but they’ll need to be restarted to take advantage of eBPF mode. ## **IPAM Prometheus metrics** Calico’s IP address management system powers a number of important capabilities. In Calico v3.18, we’ve introduced some simple Prometheus metrics to enable closer monitoring of Calico’s IPAM behavior. For instance, active IP allocations, IP blocks, and borrowed IP addresses on a per-node basis. For more information, see the [kube-controllers prometheus metrics documentation.](https://docs.projectcalico.org/v3.18/reference/kube-controllers/prometheus) ## **Operator improvement**s The version of the operator that ships with Calico v3.18.0 now includes support for the ImageSet resource, which allows you to specify precise image digests for each Calico component image. 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