What is Istio? Istio is a service mesh technology adding an abstraction layer to the network. It intercepts all or part of the traffic in a k8s cluster and executes a set of operations on it. Which operations are supported? For example, setting up smart routing or implementing a circuit breaker approach, setting up “canary deployment”. Moreover, Istio makes possible imposing a limit on external interactions and controlling all routes between the cluster and an external network.

One of the chief complexities in running large scale containerized applications is the need for continuous systems/application monitoring. Containers are very different from traditional VMs and the 3 tier applications that run on them. Monitoring that needs to ensure that SLAs promised to the business are being met as well as an ability to forecast usage trends while identifying problem areas such as bugs, capacity challenges, slowing performance, and any potential downtime.

We are excited to announce the new security capabilities of Tigera Secure Enterprise Edition 2.4. This release enables enterprise security teams to extend their existing zone-based architectures and easily connect to external resources. The highlights include DNS Policies, Threat Defense, Compliance Dashboard and Reporting, and easier installation options.

Cloud computing, containerization, and container orchestration are the most important trends in DevOps. Whether you’re a data scientist, software developer, or product manager, it’s good to know Docker and Kubernetes basics. Both technologies help you collaborate with others, deploy your projects, and increase your value to employers. In this article, we’ll cover essential Kubernetes concepts. There are a lot of Kubernetes terms, which can make it intimidating.

The early adopters have begun to find a great degree of success and it is now time for the more mainstream enterprise to get off the proverbial wall and begin exploring containers and other areas of the cloud-native landscape. However, there is a need to mitigate or manage the risk of adopting new technology as it does introduce a dimension of change that accompanies any transformation.

In today’s software-driven economy, every organization faces an imperative to modernize the way they deliver software in order to adapt and enable the digital era — or perish. Digital transformation across industries is driving the need for IT to enable Cloud-Native applications. This has led enterprises to adopt Kubernetes as the most effective way to support cloud-native architectures and to modernize their applications and IT infrastructure.

We are very excited to announce Calico v3.7. Here are some highlights from the release.

Connection tracking (“conntrack”) is a core feature of the Linux kernel’s networking stack. It allows the kernel to keep track of all logical network connections or flows, and thereby identify all of the packets which make up each flow so they can be handled consistently together.

As industries shift to a microservices approach of deploying applications using containers, data scientists can reap the benefits. Data Scientists use specific frameworks and operating systems that can often conflict with the requirements of a production system. This has led to many clashes between IT and R&D departments. IT is not going to change the OS to meet the needs of a model that needs a specific framework that won’t run on RHEL 7.2.

Today Enterprise IT does not question the value of containerized applications anymore. Given the move to adopting DevOps and cloud native architectures, it is critical to leverage container capabilities in order to enable digital transformation. Google’s Kubernetes (K8s), an open source container orchestration system, has become the de facto standard — and the key enabler — for cloud native applications, and the way they are architected, composed, deployed, and managed.