Traditional approaches to network management and security are ill-suited for the fluid nature of container and microservices-based architectures. Containers appear, disappear and are moved around to different compute nodes far too frequently to be assigned static IP addresses, much less be protected by firewalls and IP tables at the network’s perimeter.
With this in mind, two open source projects, CoreOS’ Flannel virtual networking technology, and the Project Calico, another network overlay technology with strong security controls, have joined forces to offer a single package, called Canal, that will offer policy-based secure networking for the container and microservices era.
A new San Francisco-based company has been formed, Tigera, that will manage both projects. Tigera is a spin-off of network solutions provider Metaswitch, and many of the San Francisco Metaswitch engineers who worked on Calico have moved over to Tigera. CoreOS is donating the Flannel codebase to Tigera.
Read more at The New Stack
