---
title: "Whitepaper: Managing East-West Traffic with Calico"
source: "https://www.tigera.io/lp/whitepaper-managing-east-west-traffic-with-calico/"
description: "Choose your Kubernetes east-west networking deliberately. Calico guidance on data planes, VXLAN vs BGP, and IP planning, with OpenShift and AKS worked examples."
---

# FREE WHITEPAPER: Managing East-West Traffic with Calico

A Calico Reference Architecture

### Download for free

## About this free whitepaper

Most Kubernetes east-west networking decisions are inherited rather than made: you install a CNI, take its defaults, and find out at 60 nodes that nobody actually chose them. This Calico reference architecture works the choices out deliberately: which data plane enforces policy (iptables, nftables, or eBPF), how pods reach each other (VXLAN, IP-in-IP, or BGP with no overlay), how BGP scales past the full mesh with route reflectors, and how to carve up address space before growth forces the issue. Two worked examples (on-premises OpenShift and AKS in a hub-and-spoke topology) start from nearly identical requirements and land on opposite recommendations, and the variable that separates them is not cluster size, but whether you control the network underneath.

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Build expertise across the breadth of Kubernetes networking.

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