Rafay Allies With Tigera to Advance Calico Networking Adoption
Rafay, in partnership with Tigera, today announced it has integrated Calico Open Source networking software with its platform for automating the management of Kubernetes clusters.
Mohan Atreya, chief product officer at Rafay, said Calico will become the default option for the company’s Kubernetes Operations Platform (KOP) to make it simpler to network together multiple Kubernetes clusters.
Dhiraj Sehgal, director of product marketing for Tigera, said the alliance with Rafay will make it simpler for IT teams to, for example, manage IP addresses that need to be assigned to those clusters.
As more organizations begin to deploy fleets of Kubernetes clusters, many are discovering that networking them together presents a significant challenge. The alliance between Rafay and Tigera will enable IT teams to address that challenge within the context of the same KOP platform running on the Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that they are using to automate other management tasks.
That approach also provides the added benefit of simplifying the enforcement of networking and security policy for multi-tenant environments by employing microsegmentation to better isolate workloads.
A recent Tigera survey found the need to scale services and enforce cybersecurity policies are the top two reasons for adopting that platform at 35% each, followed closely by interoperability (33%) and encryption (30%). Consequently, Calico is most commonly used to apply policies to limit pod-to-pod communication (61%), enforce secure egress access policies (41%) and implement microsegmentation policies (24%).
Overall, the survey found that 59% of respondents used multiple clusters, with 50% having clusters deployed in a hybrid cloud environment. Well over half (56%) have an average cluster size of between 10–100 nodes, with Amazon EKS being the most-used platform to host clusters.
Originally developed by Tigera, Calico is already being used across one million clusters spanning more than eight million nodes at organizations that include AT&T, Discover, Merck, NBCUniversal, HanseMerkur, Allstate, Box, Siemens Healthineers, Playtech, Royal Bank of Canada and Bell Canada. As such, Calico has already been battle-tested in enterprise IT environments, noted Atreya.
Less clear is whether those efforts are being driven by a DevOps team or by networking and security professionals who are assuming more responsibility for Kubernetes clusters running in production environments. Regardless of who within an IT organization assumes responsibility for security and networking, consistently enforcing networking and security policies will become a more pressing issue as more Kubernetes clusters are deployed in production environments.
Of course, the pace at which Kubernetes clusters are being deployed in production environments will vary from one organization to the next. The one thing that is clear, however, is that as it becomes simpler to automate the deployment of those clusters, there will be less tolerance for any networking-related delays. As such, the melding of the Kubernetes platform and networking management is rapidly becoming a requirement as the pace at which cloud-native applications are being deployed in enterprise IT environments only continues to accelerate.
