As 2023 comes to a close, we’re happy to report that we’ve had a successful year full of powerful product advancements and notable third-party recognition.

Based on the well-known cybersecurity method, “honeypots”, Calico Cloud runtime security approach of Honeypods as decoy pods are designed to attract traffic to them from malicious sources and to detect suspicious activity within a Kubernetes cluster.

This week’s news of Cisco’s intent to acquire Isovalent sends an important message to the cloud security ecosystem: network security is no longer an afterthought in the cloud-native world. It’s now a critical component of any robust security posture for cloud-native applications. This move not only validates the work of the Isovalent team in evangelizing this essential category but also underscores the vision Tigera has pioneered since 2016 with Project Calico.

The surge of cloud-native applications has propelled Kubernetes into the forefront, revolutionizing how we manage and deploy workloads. However, this exponential growth has also increased the security challenges, and attack surface, DevOps and Security teams must address. As we discussed in a previous blog post, traditional network security measures fall short when presented with Kubernetes’ dynamic nature, demanding a paradigm shift towards more adaptable solutions.

In my previous blog post, What you can’t do with Kubernetes network policies (unless you use Calico): Policies to all namespaces or pods, I talked about this use case from the list of nine things you cannot implement using basic Kubernetes network policy — policies to all namespaces or pods. In this blog post, we’ll be focusing on the next use case — advanced policy querying and reachability tooling.

One recurrent point in our first interaction with Kubernetes users is the difficulty of implementing security controls on their Kubernetes clusters where tenant or workload isolation is required during rollout or runtime. This happens due to one of the following reasons: Calico provides several features and capabilities to cover each one of the above points with Policy Recommendation, Policy Board, and Dynamic Service and Threat Graph.

Enterprises that deploy Kubernetes in corporate data centers or cloud environments often use Cisco Secure Firewall to protect their networks and cloud resources. These firewalls are crucial for examining traffic coming from Kubernetes clusters. However, accurately determining the origin of this traffic as it passes through Cisco Secure Firewall can be challenging.

We’re happy to announce that Tigera recently achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Security Competency status. This designation recognizes the security capabilities of Tigera’s Calico Cloud platform in helping customers secure their AWS workloads and achieve their cloud security goals. To receive the designation, AWS Partners must possess deep AWS expertise and deliver solutions seamlessly on AWS.

Kubernetes offers excellent scalability and flexibility to your infrastructure. Yet, in the midst of this transformation, we’ve all grappled with the difficulties of local IPv4 addressing which usually leads to the implementation of Network Address Translation (NAT) and unfolds complexities that we’d instead like to avoid. As if that weren’t enough, the scarcity of public IPv4 addresses and their expensive rental costs loom over our digital ambitions.

Over the past year, we’ve been building something new for Calico Cloud that’s aimed at helping anyone who is charged with improving the security of their Kubernetes clusters. I’m excited to announce that Calico Cloud is releasing new capabilities for security posture management called Security Scoring and Recommended Actions.