Tigera and Canonical Pair Calico With Canonical Kubernetes for Multi-Tenant Clusters

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Tigera, the company behind Calico, and Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, announced a collaboration to help enterprises run multi-tenant Kubernetes across cloud, on-premises virtual machines and edge environments. The companies are pairing Canonical’s CNCF-compliant Kubernetes distribution with Calico’s networking and network security layer in a reference architecture backed by commercial support from both vendors.

The companies said platform teams often assemble an operating system, Kubernetes distribution and networking layer from three different vendors, which leads to inconsistent hardening, uneven support timelines and network policy that behaves differently in each environment. The joint offering is intended to give those teams a single blueprint to standardize on.

Long-Term Support and Tenant Isolation

Canonical contributes Ubuntu Pro and Canonical Kubernetes, which scales from a single node to highly available clusters deployable via Cluster API. Both are supported for up to 15 years, well beyond the roughly 14-month upstream Kubernetes support window. Calico adds identity-aware microsegmentation, policy tiers that let platform teams delegate policy to tenants while keeping central guardrails, egress and ingress gateways built on the Kubernetes Gateway API, DNS-based controls and Cluster Mesh for connecting clusters across sites, all running on an eBPF data plane.

“Multi-tenant Kubernetes fails without strong governance. Calico’s policy tiers allow platform teams to establish central guardrails while giving tenants autonomy within those guardrails,” said Pervez Sikora, president of Tigera.