What’s new in Calico v3.18?

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. 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 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, 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.

Operator improvements

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.

Join our mailing list

Get updates on blog posts, workshops, certification programs, new releases, and more!

X