Tigera has launched a new free tier for Calico Cloud, designed to help Calico Open Source users tackle persistent Kubernetes networking and security challenges. The release gives platform teams a more accessible way to gain visibility into workload communications, manage complex network policies, and implement microsegmentation—all without adding cost or complexity.Calico Open Source is already widely used for Kubernetes networking and security. With version 3.30, Tigera introduced features like Calico Whisker for observability, staged policies for safer microsegmentation, and a new Ingress Gateway for managing traffic. The Calico Cloud Free Tier builds on this foundation by unlocking advanced capabilities that were previously gated behind commercial licenses.One of the key additions is Dynamic Service Graph, which gives teams a real-time view of traffic flows across workloads and namespaces. This addresses a longstanding issue for Kubernetes operators: limited visibility during troubleshooting and policy enforcement. Alongside this, users can work with Policy Board, which provides a more intuitive interface to stage, preview, and enforce network policies across clusters. These tools help reduce errors and improve confidence in security configurations before they’re applied to production environments.The free tier also includes access to cluster health dashboards and flow log analysis, giving teams a clearer picture of how traffic behaves over time and where bottlenecks or misconfigurations may be occurring. This complements the security side by enabling better-informed decisions around policy tuning and incident response.In parallel with the free tier rollout, Tigera is enhancing the broader Calico Cloud platform. New capabilities include support for WireGuard-based encryption of inter-cluster traffic via Calico Cluster Mesh, which secures data in transit without requiring a full service mesh deployment. There are also improvements to policy testing, allowing teams to simulate actions on new connections and refine enforcement without disrupting workloads.For Calico Open Source users, the free tier offers a straightforward way to extend what they already have in place, especially as security and compliance expectations rise in containerized environments. Rather than shifting to unfamiliar tools or investing in heavyweight platforms, teams can build on their existing Calico setup with features that help scale observability and control in Kubernetes—one cluster at a time.
Network Security, Cloud Security, Threat Management
Tigera Introduces Calico Cloud Free Tier to Boost Kubernetes Observability and Security
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