What is Calico?

Whether you are using Calico's eBPF data plane, Linux’s standard networking pipeline, or the Windows data plane, Calico delivers blazing-fast performance with true cloud-native scalability. Calico provides developers and cluster operators with a consistent experience and set of capabilities whether running in public cloud or on-premises, or on a single node or across a multi-thousand node cluster.

Focus

Project Calico focuses on the following points.

• Any container, any Kubernetes distro, any cloud
• Supporting multiple data planes including eBPF, standard Linux, and Windows data planes.
• Interoperability -  Work with non-Kubernetes workloads
• Optimized
 performance - Built to go faster with lower CPU consumption, to help you get the best possible performance from your investments in clusters
• Operate at scale - Lock in step scalability with Kubernetes clusters without sacrificing performance
• Granular access controls - Rich network and security policy model for secure communication and WireGuard encryption
• Full Kubernetes network policy support - Work with the original reference implementation of Kubernetes network policy

Background

Project Calico was created 6 years ago as an open-source networking and security project with an active development and user community. Calico Open Source was born out of this project and has grown to be the most widely adopted solution for networking and security for containers and Kubernetes, powering 2M+ nodes daily across 166 countries. 

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As adoption of containers and Kubernetes grew and organizations started using Kubernetes at scale, they began to encounter more advanced requirements for observability and security. Calico Open Source is a cutting-edge networking and security solution for containers and Kubernetes. The invention and continuous development of this solution would not be possible without the help of Project Calico’s 200+ (and counting) contributors around the world, ranging from private citizens to big tech companies.

Calico Main Features

Data Plane Choice

Regardless of your team’s data plane choice you could use Calico whether you are on eBPF, standard Linux, or Windows.

Optimized Performance

Using Calico helps getting the best possible performance with lower CPU consumption so you could reallocate your resources.

Full K8s Network Support

Calico provides an extra layer of security with Calico network policy without losing the original reference implementation of Kubernetes network policy.