Calico Celebrates 5 Years as Most Widely Adopted Open Source Networking and Security Technology for Containers and Kubernetes

More than 1.5 million nodes daily across 166 countries are powered by Calico

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#calico–October marks the five-year anniversary of Calico Open Source, the most widely adopted technology for container networking and security, powering over 1.5 million nodes daily in use across 166 countries. The solution grew out of Project Calico, an open-source project with an active development and user community.

“The world and technologies were much different five years ago when Calico was introduced,” said Amit Gupta, vice president of business development and product management at Tigera, the creator and maintainer of Project Calico. “The march towards distributed applications and microservices had just begun. Today, open-source projects like Calico are enabling the large-scale adoption of this modern architecture that is ultimately responsible for the wholesale transition to digital transformations that we are witnessing.”

Calico Open Source is what it is today thanks to more than 200 contributors across a broad range of companies worldwide. Calico was invented and is maintained by Tigera, the industry leader in container and Kubernetes security and observability.

Calico Open Source is a cutting-edge networking and security solution for containers, virtual machines, and native host-based workloads. The solution supports a broad range of platforms including Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker EE, OpenStack, and bare metal services.

Calico is the only open-source solution with a pluggable data plane architecture enabling support for multiple data planes, including eBPF, standard Linux, and Windows. Whether selecting Calico’s eBPF data plane, Linux’s standard networking pipeline, or the Windows data plane, Calico delivers blazing-fast performance with true cloud-native scalability. The solution provides developers and cluster operators with a consistent experience and set of capabilities whether running in public cloud or on-premises, or on a single node or across a multi-thousand node cluster.

“Calico’s adaptability is testimony to its design and architecture that keep it relevant and have made it a de facto standard for container networking and security. The architectural choices that we made over the past five years have enabled us to deliver the performance and requirements for an ever-changing landscape,” said Gupta. “Still today, Calico is recognized for its blazing-fast performance.”

Calico has been running at scale in production for years with a development test cycle that includes regular tests of multi-thousand node clusters.

To learn more, join the 5th anniversary special episode of Calico Live that will air on October 13 at 9 am Pacific time.

About Tigera

Tigera empowers organizations to secure, observe, and troubleshoot containers, Kubernetes, and cloud. Its commercial products include Calico Enterprise, a self-managed security and observability platform, and Calico Cloud, a Kubernetes-native cloud service that extends the declarative nature of Kubernetes. Its open-source offering, Calico Open Source, is the most widely adopted container networking and security solution. Tigera’s solutions specify security and observability as code to ensure consistent enforcement of security policies, which enables DevOps, platform, and security teams to protect workloads, detect threats, achieve continuous compliance, and troubleshoot service issues in real time.

Project Calico is an open-source project with an active development and user community. Calico Open Source was born out of this project and has grown to be the most widely adopted solution for container networking and security, powering 1.5 million nodes daily across 166 countries.

Calico software is supported across all major cloud providers and Kubernetes distributions, and is used by leading companies including AT&T, Discover, Merck, ServiceNow, HanseMerkur, RealPage, L3Harris, and Mindbody.