Best Container Networking Software for Kubernetes

Connect, secure, control, and observe services. Istio’s traffic routing rules let you easily control the flow of traffic and API calls between services. Istio simplifies configuration of service-level properties like circuit breakers, timeouts, and retries, and makes it easy to set up important tasks like A/B testing, canary rollouts, and staged rollouts with percentage-based traffic splits. It also provides out-of-box failure recovery features that help make your application more robust against failures of dependent services or the network. Istio Security provides a comprehensive security solution to solve these issues. This page gives an overview on how you can use Istio security features to secure your services, wherever you run them. In particular, Istio security mitigates both insider and external threats against your data, endpoints, communication, and platform. Istio generates detailed telemetry for all service communications within a mesh.

Pay-as-you-go security and observability SaaS platform for containers, Kubernetes, and cloud. Get a live view of dependencies and how all the services are communicating with each other in a multi-cluster, hybrid and multi-cloud environment. Eliminate setup and onboarding steps and troubleshoot your Kubernetes security and observability issues within minutes. Calico Cloud is a next-generation security and observability SaaS platform for containers, Kubernetes, and cloud. It enables organizations of all sizes to protect their cloud workloads and containers, detect threats, achieve continuous compliance, and troubleshoot service issues in real-time across multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and hybrid deployments. Calico Cloud is built on Calico Open Source, the most widely adopted container networking and security solution. Instead of managing a platform for container and Kubernetes security and observability, teams consume it as a managed service for faster analysis, relevant actions, etc.

Calico is an open-source networking and network security solution for containers, virtual machines, and native host-based workloads. Calico supports a broad range of platforms including Kubernetes, OpenShift, Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE), OpenStack, and bare metal services. Whether you opt to use Calico's eBPF data plane or Linux’s standard networking pipeline, Calico delivers blazing-fast performance with true cloud-native scalability. Calico provides developers and cluster operators with a consistent experience and set of capabilities whether running in the public cloud or on-prem, on a single node, or across a multi-thousand-node cluster. Calico gives you a choice of data planes, including a pure Linux eBPF data plane, a standard Linux networking data plane, and a Windows HNS data plane. Whether you prefer the cutting-edge features of eBPF or the familiarity of the standard primitives that existing system administrators already know, Calico has you covered.

NGINX Open Source: The open source web server that powers more than 400 million websites. NGINX Plus is a software load balancer, web server, and content cache built on top of open source NGINX. Use NGINX Plus instead of your hardware load balancer and get the freedom to innovate without being constrained by infrastructure. Save more than 80% compared to hardware ADCs, without sacrificing performance or functionality. Deploy anywhere: public cloud, private cloud, bare metal, virtual machines, and containers. Save time by performing common tasks through the built‑in NGINX Plus API. From NetOps to DevOps, modern app teams need a self‑service, API‑driven platform that integrates easily into CI/CD workflows to accelerate app deployment – whether your app has a hybrid or microservices architecture – and makes app lifecycle management easier.

F5 Aspen Mesh empowers companies to drive more performance from their modern app environment by leveraging the power of their service mesh. As part of F5, Aspen Mesh is focused on delivering enterprise-class products that enhance companies’ modern app environments. Deliver new and differentiating features faster with microservices. Aspen Mesh lets you do that at scale, with confidence. Reduce the risk of downtime and improve your customers’ experience. If you’re scaling microservices to production on Kubernetes, Aspen Mesh will help you get the most out of your distributed systems. Aspen Mesh empowers companies to drive more performance from their modern app environment by leveraging the power of their service mesh. Alerts that decrease the risk of application failure or performance degradation based on data and machine learning models. Secure Ingress safely exposes enterprise apps to customers and the web.

Streamline and simplify Kubernetes (north-south) network traffic management, delivering consistent, predictable performance at scale without slowing down your apps. Advanced app‑centric configuration – Use role‑based access control (RBAC) and self‑service to set up security guardrails (not gates), so your teams can manage their apps securely and with agility. Enable multi‑tenancy, reusability, simpler configs, and more. A native, type‑safe, and indented configuration style to simplify capabilities like circuit breaking, sophisticated routing, header manipulation, mTLS authentication, and WAF. Plus if you’re already using NGINX, NGINX Ingress resources make it easy to adapt existing configuration from your other environments.

As Kubernetes gains adoption, teams are finding they must deploy and manage multiple clusters to facilitate features like geo-redundancy, scale, and fault isolation for their applications. With Submariner, your applications and services can span multiple cloud providers, data centers, and regions. The Broker must be deployed on a single Kubernetes cluster. This cluster’s API server must be reachable by all Kubernetes clusters connected by Submariner. It can be a dedicated cluster, or one of the connected clusters. Once Submariner is deployed on a cluster with the proper credentials to the Broker it will exchange Cluster and Endpoint objects with other clusters (via push/pull/watching), and start forming connections and routes to other clusters. Worker node IPs on all connected clusters must be outside of the Pod/Service CIDR ranges.

Solve your tooling complexity and overload with the simplicity of only one networking and security tool. Save time and swivel-chair fatigue from context switches as you consolidate. TF is a plugin integration overachiever, never implementing the bare minimum. Here is a sample of what it can do that most other SDN plugins can’t. Networks have borders that need crossing. Speaking the same language of proven open protocol standards in the control and data plane is TF’s specialty, so that your domain is never an island. Open source keeps innovation flowing from many directions, and provides the flexibility to shape the outcomes you need, or turn to vendors you trust. Option of Namespace isolation and per-microservice micro-segmentation with choice of TF tenants, networks or security rules

5G technology is very different in nature when compared to previous generations of wireless networks. 5G can be viewed as a collection of end-to-end use cases rather than just a collection of technology. Use cases include, but are not limited to – remote healthcare, autonomous cars, industrial advanced robotics, smart utilities, smart agriculture and more. These use cases require a different network architecture comprised of various features. This allows the wireless service providers to have one network for all devices 2G to 5G. It is the common software across Mavenir products and services that enables agility and speed in the delivery of new applications, as well as the adoption of new technologies. It is unique because it brings the best practices from the hyper- scale cloud and IT industries for rapid design, development, testing and rollout.

Converged Cloud Fabric (CCF)™ is an automated fabric built with cloud networking design principles. CCF leverages VPC/VNet constructs on-prem to deliver a cloud Network-as-a-Service operational model. CCF automates networking for multiple private cloud platforms, enabling the network to operate at the speed of VMs and Containers. With built-in analytics and telemetry, CCF provides real-time contextual visibility across the fabric and one-click troubleshooting workflows. With CCF, NetOps, DevOps and CloudOps teams can effectively collaborate, and rapidly on-board applications and tenants. CCF enables mainstream and midsize organizations to leverage network as a strategic pillar of the digital transformation strategy. With CCF's self-service networking and contextual intelligence, NetOps team can focus on innovations such as new services and analytics, instead of time-consuming manual tasks.

Cilium is open-source software for providing, securing and observing network connectivity between container workloads, cloud native, and fueled by the revolutionary Kernel technology eBPF. Kubernetes doesn't come with an implementation of Load Balancing. This is usually left as an exercise for your cloud provider or in private cloud environments an exercise for your networking team. Cilium can attract this traffic with BGP and accelerate leveraging XDP and eBPF. Together these technologies provide a very robust and secure implementation of load balancing. Cilium and eBPF operate at the kernel layer. With this level of context, we can make intelligent decisions about how to connect different workloads whether on the same node or between clusters. With eBPF and XDP Cilium enables significant improvements in latency and performance and eliminates the need for Kube-proxy entirely.