What is Calico Enterprise?
Modern applications are more distributed, dynamically orchestrated, and run across multi-cloud infrastructure. To protect workloads and enforce compliance, connectivity must be established and secured in a highly dynamic environment that includes microservices, containers, and virtual machines.
Calico Enterprise provides secure application connectivity across multi-cloud and legacy environments, with the enterprise control and compliance capabilities required for mission-critical deployments.
Designed from the ground up as cloud-native software, Calico Enterprise builds on leading open source projects like Calico. It connects and secures container, virtual machine, and bare metal host workloads in public cloud and private data centers.
Why use Calico Enterprise?
Best practices for network security
Calico Enterprise’s rich network policy model makes it easy to lock down communication so the only traffic that flows is the traffic you want to flow. You can think of Calico Enterprise’s security enforcement as wrapping each of your workloads with its own personal firewall that is dynamically re-configured in real time as you deploy new services or scale your application up or down.
Calico Enterprise’s policy engine can enforce the same policy model at the host networking layer and (if using Istio & Envoy) at the service mesh layer, protecting your infrastructure from compromised workloads and protecting your workloads from compromised infrastructure.
Performance
Calico Enterprise uses the Linux kernel’s built-in highly optimized forwarding and access control capabilities to deliver native Linux networking dataplane performance, typically without requiring any of the encap/decap overheads associated with first generation SDN networks. Calico Enterprise’s control plane and policy engine has been fine tuned over many years of production use to minimize overall CPU usage and occupancy.
Scalability
Calico Enterprise’s core design principles leverage best practice cloud-native design patterns combined with proven standards based network protocols trusted worldwide by the largest internet carriers. The result is a solution with exceptional scalability that has been running at scale in production for years. Calico Enterprise’s development test cycle includes regularly testing multi-thousand node clusters. Whether you are running a 10 node cluster, 100 node cluster, or more, you reap the benefits of the improved performance and scalability characteristics demanded by the largest Kubernetes clusters.
Interoperability
Calico Enterprise enables Kubernetes workloads and non-Kubernetes or legacy workloads to communicate seamlessly and securely. Kubernetes pods are first class citizens on your network and able to communicate with any other workload on your network. In addition Calico Enterprise can seamlessly extend to secure your existing host based workloads (whether in public cloud or on-prem on VMs or bare metal servers) alongside Kubernetes. All workloads are subject to the same network policy model so the only traffic that is allowed to flow is the traffic you expect to flow.
Looks familiar
Calico Enterprise uses the Linux primitives that existing system administrators are already familiar with. Type in your favorite Linux networking command and you’ll get the results you expect. In the vast majority of deployments the packet leaving your application is the packet that goes on the wire, with no encapsulation, tunnels, or overlays. All the existings tools that system and network administrators use to gain visibility and analyze networking issues work as they do today.
Real world production hardened
Calico Enterprise is trusted and running in production at large enterprises including SaaS providers, financial services companies, and manufacturers. The largest public cloud providers have selected Calico Enterprise to provide network security for their hosted Kubernetes services (Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, Google GKE, and IBM IKS) running across tens of thousands of clusters.
Full Kubernetes network policy support
Calico Enterprise’s network policy engine formed the original reference implementation of Kubernetes network policy during the development of the API. Calico Enterprise is distinguished in that it implements the full set of features defined by the API giving users all the capabilities and flexibility envisaged when the API was defined. And for users that require even more power, Calico Enterprise supports an extended set of network policy capabilities that work seamlessly alongside the Kubernetes API giving users even more flexibility in how they define their network policies.
