Calico Series: Introduction

Kubernetes Apr 19, 2021

This is going to be a really fun series to write about! I've promised so many people documentation around Calico at various stages of my career, and I finally have some time to get into it. This is going to be part of a much larger series regarding networking for Kubernetes, and the many use cases that can be explored. Calico is one of the more fascinating deployment options for Kubernetes. It's not only one of the oldest CNI's available for Kubernetes, but it's also one of the most well-maintained, thanks to the continued development from the great folks at Tigera. And although I may have some bias towards the project (full disclosure: Tigera is my previous employer), when it comes to the comparisons portion of this series, I promise to be fair and open to feedback from each of the project teams/leads. So let's get right into it!

Because of the sheer amount of content that I could write about in this series, I am going to break content up into sections and leverage Ghost labels to organize things for readers. For each of the CNI's covered, the following sub-topics will be covered:

Installation (multiple platforms covered, allowing for guest writers)
Use Cases
Performance
Notable Market Strengths
Application for Telecommunications

My intention is to make this series easily searchable, useful, and expand on what you already may know about these CNI's. I'll also get into some edge cases for difference industries, and potentially how these CNI's can be hacked a bit to work in different scenarios (think in use cases with MetalLB or something similar).

Installation

Calico Installation on kubeadmin
Calico Installation on OpenShift (VMWare IPI)
Calico Installation on OpenShift (Assisted Installer)

Use Cases

Performance

Notable Market Strengths

Conclusion

This series will be ongoing, and include many different CNI comparisons. I'll be sure to include a timestamp at the bottom (for freshness), and I am happy to take any user/developer feedback as well!

Updated: 04/19/2021