Cloud computing and the use of cloud native architectures enable unparalleled performance, flexibility, and velocity. The speed of innovation has driven significant advancements across industries, but as digitalization continues pushing applications and services to the cloud, bad actors’ intrusion techniques have also become more sophisticated.

Microservices are loosely coupled software that provides flexibility and scalability to a cloud environment. However, securing this open architecture from vulnerabilities and malicious actors can be challenging without a service mesh. This blog post will demonstrate how you can create an Istio and Calico integration to establish a service mesh that will manipulate HTTP traffic in the application layer.

Tigera provides the industry’s only active Cloud-Native Application Security Platform (CNAPP) for containers and Kubernetes. Available as a fully managed SaaS (Calico Cloud) or a self-managed service (Calico Enterprise), the platform prevents, detects, troubleshoots, and automatically mitigates exposure risks of security issues in build, deploy, and runtime stages across multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and hybrid deployments.

Kubernetes has come of age with more organizations adopting a microservices architecture at scale. But scale brings a whole slew of new challenges, especially with Kubernetes, which is designed to operate as a single cluster. However, the usage of Kubernetes, especially at leading-edge organizations operating at scale, has crossed the single-cluster threshold.

Cloud-native applications offer a lot of flexibility and scalability, but to leverage these advantages, we must create and deploy a suitable environment that will enable cloud-native applications to work their magic. Managed services, self-managed services, and bare metal are three primary categories of Kubernetes deployment in a cloud environment.

Companies are increasingly adopting managed Kubernetes services, such as Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), to build container-based applications. Leveraging a managed Kubernetes service is a quick and easy way to deploy an enterprise-grade Kubernetes cluster, offload mundane operations such as provisioning new nodes, upgrading the OS/Kubernetes, and scaling resources according to business needs.

Productive, scalable, and cost-effective, cloud infrastructure empowers innovation and faster deliverables. It’s a no-brainer why organizations are migrating to the cloud and containerizing their applications. As businesses scale their cloud infrastructure, they cannot be bottlenecked by security concerns. One way to release these bottlenecks and free up resources is by using automation.

A couple of weeks ago, TIgera engineers released the new version of Calico, as part of a community effort to drive cloud security and networking even further. But before I begin diving into the details of this new release, I want to first spotlight a few of our community members who have merged their contributions to Calico Open Source for the first time.

In this issue of the Calico Community Spotlight series, I’ve asked Burak Tahtacioglu from ParkLab Technology to share his experience with Kubernetes and Calico Open Source. Let’s take a look at how Burak started his Kubernetes journey, and the insights he gained from Calico Open Source. Q: Please tell us a little bit about yourself, including where you currently work and what you do there. I am a Sr. Software Developer in our Developer Experience team.