Calico is an open-source and commercial networking and security solution designed for containers, virtual machines, and native host-based workloads. It simplifies, scales, and secures container and Kubernetes networks by offering features like network policy management, threat detection, and compliance support.

Key Features

• Networking: Provides fast, scalable, and highly available pod-to-pod networking across single and multi-cluster Kubernetes environments.
• Data Planes: Offers choices including eBPF, nftables, IP tables, Windows, and VPP for network traffic management.
• Encryption: Uses WireGuard for data-in-transit encryption with better performance and lower CPU consumption.
• Ingress Gateway: Manages Kubernetes ingress traffic using the Gateway API with Envoy Gateway integration.
• Egress Gateway & Firewall Integration: Assigns stable IP addresses to egress traffic and extends firewall rules for workload security.
• Cluster Mesh: Enables pod-to-pod connectivity across clusters with centralized management.
• Microsegmentation: Deploys Layer 7 network security policies for application-level protection.
• Network Threat Detection: Includes workload-level IDS/IPS and WAF for HTTP-based attack protection.
• CI/CD Integration: Automates security policy deployment with tools like ArgoCD and Jenkins.
• Compliance & Audit: Supports major compliance standards with real-time monitoring and audit-ready reports.

Benefits

• Enhanced Security: Simplifies network security enforcement and detects both known and zero-day threats.
• Compliance Management: Supports major compliance standards with continuous monitoring and audit-ready reports.
• Scalability: Offers cloud-native scalability for large-scale deployments.
• Unified Management: Provides a single pane of glass for network security controls across multi-cluster environments.