Best Container Networking Software for Red Hat OpenShift

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.

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.

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

flannel is a virtual networking layer designed specifically for containers. OpenShift Container Platform can use it for networking containers instead of the default software-defined networking (SDN) components. This is useful if running OpenShift Container Platform within a cloud provider platform that also relies on SDN, such as OpenStack, and you want to avoid encapsulating packets twice through both platforms. Each flanneld agent provides this infomation to a centralized etcd store so other agents on hosts can route packets to other containers within the flannel network. The following diagram illustrates the architecture and data flow from one container to another using a flannel network.