BERLIN – Nearly a year ago, 323 days ago to be exact, Andy Randall came to Berlin to announce the formation of his new company called Tigera. That announcement came at the CoreOS Fest event, the foundation of the new open-source project calico, including elements of CoreOS’s flannel container networking project.
Today at the CloudNativeCon EU/Kubecon event here, Randall emphasized that he remains enthusiastic about container networking, especially for Kubernetes. He noted that the needs of networking change in the cloud native environment.
According to Randall, in cloud native environments, workloads are larger, while containers often have shorter lifespans. As such, with cloud native environment, Randall said that there orders of magnitude of greater churn per host and a level of churn that traditional Software Defined Networking (SDN) and security systems are not designed for.
“We feel that the networking layer needs to be simplified and scalable and also believe that security has to be dynamic and fine grained,” Randall said.
Tigera as a company is working on and contributes to the Container Networking Interface (CNI) effort as well as flannel and calico. Randall noted that Tigera isn’t working on container networking alone and there is an active community of contributors to project calico.
“When we started we had 25 external contributors, now 323 days later was have 92,” Randall said.
He added that the online community for calico has also grown from 283 a year ago to 925 today.
While Tigera and Project Calico will work in multiple types of environments, it is the Kubernetes community that is providing the most growth.
“We just attached ourselves to the rocket ship that is Kubernetes,” Randall said. “Calico doesn’t just integrate with Kubernetes, but we found that over three quarters or our users focused on Kubernetes.”
“We’re on a journey building a future where developers can create high performance secure cloud native apps and operations teams can achieve the visibility and control that they need,” he added.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
