We are excited to announce the release of Calico v3.26! This latest milestone brings a range of enhancements and new features to the Calico ecosystem, delivering an optimized and secure networking solution. This release has a strong emphasis on product performance, with strengthened security measures, expanded compatibility with Windows Server 2022 and OpenStack Yoga, and notable improvements to the Calico eBPF dataplane.
Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration, providing a powerful platform for deploying and managing containerized applications at scale. As more organizations adopt Kubernetes for their production workloads, ensuring the security and privacy of data in transit has become increasingly critical.
Almost all modern network systems, including stateful firewalls, make use of connection tracking (“conntrack”) because it consumes less processing power per packet and simplifies operations. However, there are use cases where connection tracking has a negative impact, as we described in Linux Conntrack: Why it breaks down and avoiding the problem.
Organizations are adopting Kubernetes on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to modernize their applications. But Kubernetes clusters and application lifecycles demand a considerable investment of cost and resources, especially for edge applications.
FortiGate firewalls are highly popular and extensively utilized for perimeter-based security in a wide range of applications, including monolithic applications developed and deployed using the traditional waterfall model. These firewalls establish a secure perimeter around applications, effectively managing inbound and outbound traffic for the organization. FortiGate relies on IP addresses for implementing “allow/deny” policies.
Founded in 1990, Aldagi is Georgia’s first and biggest private insurance firm. With a 32% market share in Georgia’s insurance sector, Aldagi provides a broad range of services to corporate and retail clients. With the onset of the pandemic in 2019, Aldagi wanted to make its services available to customers online. To this end, the company adopted an Agile methodology for software development and re-architected its traditional VM-based applications into cloud-native applications.
The adoption of cloud native applications has become a necessity for organizations to run their businesses efficiently. As per Gartner, more than 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025, which will rely on adopting cloud native applications for complete execution. The massive increase in adoption of cloud native applications has given rise to more security challenges such as container image vulnerabilities, configuration errors and a larger runtime attack surface.
As containerized applications become increasingly complex, it can be challenging to design and execute an effective container security strategy. With the growing trend towards cloud-based applications and services, cyber criminals are also evolving their attack techniques, making container security solutions more critical than ever. Calico provides robust detection capabilities to detect known and zero-day container and network-based attacks.
In today’s fast-paced software development environment, developers often use common public libraries and modules to quickly build applications. However, this presents a significant challenge for DevOps teams who must ensure that these applications are safe to use.
Organizations can reduce security risks in containerized applications by actively managing vulnerabilities through scanning, automated image deployment, tracking runtime risk and deploying mitigating controls to reduce risk Kubernetes and containers have become de facto standards for cloud-native application development due to their ability to accelerate the pace of innovation and codify best practices for production deployments, but such acceleration can introduce risk if not operationalized properly.
