Tigera Enhances Calico’s Cluster Mesh Capabilities to Simplify Management and Security of Multi-Cluster Deployments Across Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments

Centralized management plane for security, observability, and networking overcomes challenges faced by large-scale enterprises when adopting multi-cluster environments

San Francisco, December 1, 2022 – Tigera, provider of the industry’s only active Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) with full-stack observability for containers and Kubernetes, today announced enhancements to its cluster mesh capabilities for managing multi-cluster environments with Calico. As large and leading-edge enterprises accelerate deployments to enhance their services at scale, they have encountered management challenges that can put their environments at risk. Calico provides an operationally simple solution to create a Kubernetes cluster mesh to ensure enterprise infrastructure can run multi-cluster environments efficiently, securely, and compliantly – no matter its complexity.

Organizations increasingly rely on multiple clusters for reasons ranging from high availability, disaster recovery, and application isolation, to phased upgrades and migration. However, the introduction of additional clusters also brings an entirely new set of security challenges for enterprises. Because Kubernetes does not natively support inter-cluster communication, it is difficult to manage basic environment functions such as service discovery, observability, compliance, and network and security policy control.

Calico addresses these issues by providing a centralized multi-cluster management plane to enable security, observability, and networking management across multiple clusters in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Calico brings the same capabilities expected from single cluster environments to those with multiple clusters, enabling Calico to scale to any enterprise’s needs. The Calico Service Mesh offers significant advantages for multi-cluster environments, including:

• Unified security policy controls: Complex digital transformation initiatives have led to phased infrastructure modernization, and it is common for legacy services on VMs and hosts to run alongside modern microservices in containers. Calico provides a unified policy framework that works across bare metal, hosts, VMs, and containers to enable legacy and modern environments to co-exist seamlessly.
• Unified network security management: Calico provides capabilities to manage network security across all Kubernetes clusters. These include centralized logins, points of control, log management, troubleshooting tools, storage management, compliance reporting and more.
• Federation: Calico enables users to create policies in one cluster that reference pods in another cluster using federated identity. Federated services further provide service discovery of remote pods in another cluster. With these two features, users can regain control of multi-cluster security through fine-grained controls across endpoints, tiers, and both remote and local microservices.
• Observability and troubleshooting: Calico offers visibility into service-to-service communication in a resource-efficient and cost-effective way through Kubernetes-native Dynamic Service and Threat Graph visualizations. No matter which data plane a team uses (standard Linux iptables, Windows, or eBPF), Calico provides observability, traffic flow management, and control.Encryption and Zero Trust: Calico leverages the latest in crypto technology to offer encryption for data in transit. As a result, Calico’s encryption provides robust security while also allowing visibility into workload communication. Further, Calico’s advanced zero-trust security policy engine reduces the application’s attack surface through machine learning that combats runtime security risks from known and zero-day threats by prioritizing and mitigating the risks from vulnerabilities through security policy changes.

Calico is supported across all major cloud providers and Kubernetes distributions, empowering industry-leading companies to operate at scale with the security solutions they need to keep pace with modern innovations.

“Calico provides an elegant and simple solution for organizations running complex, large, and leading-edge Kubernetes environments,” said Ratan Tipirneni, President and CEO of Tigera. “With Calico, you can support a Kubernetes Cluster Mesh to unlock a new level of scale for Kubernetes environments so enterprises can spend less time on day-to-day security, compliance, and network performance concerns and more time on service delivery.”

Download Tigera’s new whitepaper, “Using Calico to create a Kubernetes Cluster Mesh for multi-cluster environments” to learn more.

Click here to learn more about Tigera’s solutions or request a free trial.

About Tigera

Tigera provides the industry’s only active Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) with full-stack observability for containers, Kubernetes, and cloud. The company’s platform prevents, detects, troubleshoots, and automatically mitigates exposure risks of security issues in build, deploy, and runtime stages. Tigera delivers its platform as a fully managed SaaS (Calico Cloud) or a self-managed service (Calico Enterprise). Its open-source offering, Calico Open Source, is the most widely adopted container networking and security solution. Tigera’s platform specifies security and observability as code to ensure consistent enforcement of security policies, which enables DevOps, platform, and security teams to protect workloads, detect threats, achieve continuous compliance, and troubleshoot service issues in real time.

Powering more than 100M containers across 2M+ nodes in 166 countries, Calico software is supported across all major cloud providers and Kubernetes distributions, and is used by leading companies including AT&T, Discover, Merck, NBCUniversal, HanseMerkur, Allstate, L3Harris, Siemens Healthineers, and Bell Canada.

Contact:

Katherine Benfield for Tigera

Lumina Communications

tigera@luminapr.com