Best Container Networking Software for Red Hat OpenShift

Secure and observability SaaS platform that charges per-use for containers, Kubernetes and the cloud. Live view of dependencies and how services communicate with each other in multi-cluster, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. You can eliminate the setup and onboarding steps, and you can troubleshoot any Kubernetes security or observability issues in minutes. Calico Cloud is a next generation security and observability SaaS platform that supports containers, Kubernetes and cloud. It allows organizations of all sizes and budgets to protect their cloud workloads, containers, detect threats, maintain compliance, and troubleshoot issues in real time across multi-cluster, hybrid, and multi-cloud deployments. Calico Cloud is built upon Calico Open Source, which is the most widely used container networking and security solution. Instead of managing a platform that provides Kubernetes security or observability, teams can use it as a managed service to speed up analysis, relevant actions, and so on.

Streamline and simplify Kubernetes' (north/south) network traffic management. This will deliver consistent, predictable performance at scale without slowing your apps. Advanced app-centric configuration – Use role-based access control and self-service to set security guardrails (not gate) so that your teams can manage their apps securely. Multi-tenancy, reusability and simpler configurations are all possible. Native, type-safe, indented configuration style that simplifies capabilities such as circuit breaking, sophisticated routing and header manipulation, mTLS authentication and WAF. NGINX Ingress resources allow you to easily adapt configurations from other environments if you already use NGINX.

Calico is an open source networking and security solution for containers, virtual machines and native host-based workloads. Calico supports many platforms, including Kubernetes and OpenShift, Mirantis Kubernetes Engine, (MKE), OpenStack and bare metal. Calico delivers lightning-fast performance and true cloud-native scalability, regardless of whether you use Calico's eBPF or Linux's standard network pipeline. Calico offers developers and cluster operators a consistent experience and set capabilities, whether they are running on-prem or in the public cloud, on a single node or in a multi-thousand-node cluster. Calico offers a variety of data planes. These include a pure Linux-based eBPF data plan, a standard Linux networking data data plane and a Windows HNS information plane. Calico has the right data plane for you, whether you prefer the cutting-edge features offered by eBPF or the familiarity provided by the standard primitives that system administrators already know.

With one security and networking tool, you can solve your tooling overload and tooling complexity. Consolidating saves time and reduces the risk of getting swivel-chair fatigue due to context switches. TF is a plugin integration super-star, never implementing anything less than necessary. Here's a sample of what TF can do that other SDN plugins cannot. Networks require that borders be crossed. TF is a specialist in the use of the same language as the data and control planes, so your domain is never an island. Open source allows innovation to flow from many directions and gives you the freedom to create the outcomes you want or to trust vendors. Optional Namespace isolation and per microservice micro-segmentation, with the choice of TF tenants or networks or security rules

Flannel is a virtual layer of networking that was specifically designed for containers. OpenShift Container Platform can use it to create networking containers, instead of the default software defined networking (SDN). This is useful when OpenShift Container Platform is running within a cloud provider platform which also relies upon SDN (e.g. OpenStack) and you want to avoid having packets encapsulated twice through both platforms. Each flanneld agent gives this information to a central etcd store, so that other agents on hosts can route packets within the flannel system. The following diagram shows the architecture and data flow between containers using a Flannel network.