23andMe is a popular genetics testing company, which was valued at $6B in 2021. Unfortunately, there was a massive data breach in December 2023, which caused a steep decline in the company’s value and trust, plummeting the company to a penny stock. While this breach was not directly related to Kubernetes, the same risks apply to containers running in your Kubernetes environments.

Calico, the leading solution for container networking and security, unveils a host of new features this spring. From new security capabilities that simplify operations, enhanced visualization for faster troubleshooting, and major enhancements to its popular workload-centric distributed WAF, Calico is set to redefine how you manage and secure your containerized workloads. This blog describes the new capabilities in Calico.

Network policies are essential for securing your Kubernetes clusters. They allow you to control which pods can communicate with each other, and to what extent. However, it can be difficult to keep track of all of your network policies and to ensure that they are configured correctly. This is especially true if you have a large and complex cluster with more than 100 nodes. One way to address this challenge is to leverage Prometheus and AlertManager embedded in Calico Enterprise/Cloud.

Observability, especially in the context of cloud-native applications, is important for several reasons. First and foremost is security. By design, cloud-native applications rely on multiple, dynamic, distributed, and highly ephemeral components or microservices, with each microservice operating and scaling independently to deliver the application functionality.