Calico is an open source networking and network security solution for containers, virtual machines, and native host-based workloads. Calico supports a broad range of platforms including Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker EE, OpenStack, and bare metal. In this blog, we will focus on Kubernetes pod networking and network security using Calico. Calico uses etcd as the back-end datastore. When you run Calico on Kubernetes, you can use the same etcd datastore through the Kubernetes API server.

Container use continues to grow, and Kubernetes is the most widely adopted container orchestration system, managing nearly half of all container deployments.1 Successful integration of container services within the enterprise depends heavily on access to external resources such as databases, cloud services, third-party application programming interfaces (APIs), and other applications. All this egress activity must be controlled for security and compliance reasons.

2020 is predicted to be an exciting year with more organizations adopting Kubernetes than ever before. As critical workloads with sensitive data migrate to the cloud, we can expect to encounter various Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) targeting that environment.

We are excited to announce the general availability of Calico Enterprise 2.7. With this release, Fortinet’s 400,000 customers can use FortiGate to enforce network security policies into and out of the Kubernetes cluster as well as traffic between pods within the cluster.

2019 was a big year for Kubernetes adoption, and 2020 is sure to exceed that pace. Already, we have seen a large number of organizations migrating their workloads to Kubernetes (k8s) both in public and private clouds as they embrace a hybrid cloud strategy. With so much at stake, what are you currently using for network security inside your k8s cluster?