
Felix Felix is a Calico component that runs on every machine that provides endpoints. Configuration
What is Calico Felix network?
Kubernetes cluster: inside calico felix networking. Every node of the clusters has running a calico/node container that containes the BGP agent necessary for Calico routing. It’s a mesh network where every nodes has a peering connections with all the others. It’s possible to go inside the calico pod and check the mesh network state:
What is Calico-Felix daemon?
The final component in the calico stack is the calico-felix daemon. This is the tool that performs all the magic in the calico stack. It has multiple responsibilities:
What is calico and how does it work?
What is Calico? Calico is a container networking solution created by Tigera. While solutions like Flannel operate over layer 2, Calico makes use of layer 3 to route packets to pods. The way it does this is relatively simple in practice.
What is CALICO in Kubernetes?
What is Calico? Calico is a container networking solution created by Tigera. While solutions like Flannel operate over layer 2, Calico makes use of layer 3 to route packets to pods. The way it does this is relatively simple in practice. Calico can also provide network policy for Kubernetes.

What is calico used for in Kubernetes?
Calico enables Kubernetes workloads and non-Kubernetes or legacy workloads to communicate seamlessly and securely. Kubernetes pods are first class citizens on your network and able to communicate with any other workload on your network.
What is Calico in cloud?
Calico Cloud is a fully managed pay-as-you-go SaaS based Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) with full-stack observability for containers, Kubernetes, and cloud on AWS and EKS clusters.
What is calico Sdn?
Calico is one of the SDN solution that provides networking between microservices in kubernetes world. Calico is designed to simplify, scale and secure cloud networks so that troubleshooting will be easier when compared to traditional SDN solutions.
What is calico network policy?
In a Calico network policy, you create ingress and egress rules independently (egress, ingress, or both). You can specify whether policy applies to ingress, egress, or both using the types field. If you do not use the types field, Calico defaults to the following values.
Is calico a service mesh?
Calico enables a single-pane-of-glass unified control to address the three most popular service mesh use cases—security, observability, and control—with an operationally simpler approach, while avoiding the complexities associated with deploying a separate, standalone service mesh.
Is calico an overlay?
Overlay network modes Calico can provide both VXLAN or IP-in-IP overlay networks, including cross-subnet only modes.
What is calico interface?
Calico implements the Kubernetes Container Network Interface (CNI) as a plug-in and provides agents for Kubernetes to provide networking for containers and pods. Calico creates a flat Layer-3 network and assigns a fully routable IP address to every pod.
What is calico printing?
Definition of calico printing : the process of making fast-color designs on cotton fabrics, especially calico.
What is CNI in Kubernetes?
Container Network Interface (CNI) is a framework for dynamically configuring networking resources. It uses a group of libraries and specifications written in Go. The plugin specification defines an interface for configuring the network, provisioning IP addresses, and maintaining connectivity with multiple hosts.
Why do you need calico?
Calico makes uses of BGP to propagate routes between hosts. BGP (if you're not aware) is widely used to propagate routes over the internet. It's suggested you make yourself familiar with some of the concepts if you're using Calico. Bird runs on every host in the Kubernetes cluster, usually as a DaemonSet.
What is the use of network policy?
Network policies are sets of conditions, constraints, and settings that allow you to designate who is authorized to connect to the network and the circumstances under which they can or cannot connect.
How do I check my calico status?
Ensure that the following calico pods are running:calico-node-*calico-kube-controllers-* Run the following command to check the pod status: kubectl get pods
What does calico node do?
calico/node agent bird is an open source BGP agent for Linux® that is used to exchange routing information between the hosts. The routes that are programmed by felix are picked up by bird and distributed among the cluster hosts.
What is calico printing?
Definition of calico printing : the process of making fast-color designs on cotton fabrics, especially calico.
How do you install calico in Kubernetes?
How to Install Calico on a Bare Metal InstanceStep 1: Install Kubernetes Management Tools. ... Step 2: Install Docker. ... Step 3: Disable Swap. ... Step 4: Initialize Kubernetes. ... Step 5: Install Calico Operator. ... Step 6: Apply Custom Resources. ... Step 7: Confirm Successful Deployment.
What is CNI in Kubernetes?
Container Network Interface (CNI) is a framework for dynamically configuring networking resources. It uses a group of libraries and specifications written in Go. The plugin specification defines an interface for configuring the network, provisioning IP addresses, and maintaining connectivity with multiple hosts.
What is Calico?
Calico is a container networking solution created by Tigera. While solutions like Flannel operate over layer 2, Calico makes use of layer 3 to route packets to pods. The way it does this is relatively simple in practice. Calico can also provide network policy for Kubernetes. We’ll ignore this for the time being, and focus purely on how it provides container networking.
What is the final component of the Calico stack?
The final component in the calico stack is the calico-felix daemon. This is the tool that performs all the magic in the calico stack. It has multiple responsibilities:
What is confd in Calico?
Then, there’s some etcd keys that you should read information from. Essentially, confd is what writes the BIRD configuration for Calico. If you examine the keys there, you’ll see the kind of thing it reads:
Where is the default location for calico keys?
You can examine the information that calico provides by using etcdctl. The default location for the calico keys is /calico
Which subnet does Calico use?
Each host that has calico/node running on it has its own /26 subnet. You can verify this by looking in etcd:
Is Calico a simple ip?
Hopefully, you now have a better knowledge of how exactly Calico gets the job done. At its core, it’s actually relatively simple, simply ip routes on each host. What it does it take the difficult in managing those routes away from you, giving you a simple, easy solution to container networking.
Does Calico have an interface?
There’s an interface for our pod! When the container spun up, calico (via CNI) created an interface for us and assigned it to the pod. How did it do that?
What is a calico?
Calico is a open source networking and network solution for containers that can be easily integrated with kubernetes by the container network interface specification that are well described here.
What is a calico plugin?
The calico cni plugin, invoked as binary from kubelet and installed by the init container of calico-node daemon set, responsible for inserting a network interface into the container network namespace (e.g. one end of a veth pair) and making any necessary changes on the host (e.g. attaching the other end of the veth).
What is calico/kube-controllers?
It runs as Deployment and it has the scope to manage the network policy watching the Kubernetes API for Pod, Namespace, and NetworkPolicy events and configuring Calico in response. It runs as a single pod managed by a ReplicaSet.
What is the interface between Kubernetes and Calico?
The interface between the kubernetes and the calico plugin is the container network interface described in this github project: https://github.com/containernetworking/cni/blob/master/SPEC.md
Does Felix agent use BGP?
Following a graphic rapresentation about the ip-ip tunneling implementation by Felix agent running in both nodes of the cluster. Every felix agent receives via BGP the subnet assigned to other node and configure a route in the routing tables for forwarding this subnet received by ip in ip tunneling.
Does Calico support hostport?
type: portmap and snat: true, The calico networking plugin supports hostPort and this enable calico to perform DNAT and SNAT for the Pod hostPort feature. Kubernetes suggest to use instead of it the kubernetes port forward: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/port-forward-access-application-cluster/ .
What license is Felix under?
Felix itself, along with most of Calico, is licensed under the Apache v2.0 license. The BPF programs in the bpf-gpl directory are licensed under the GPL v2.0 for compatibility with Linux kernel helper functions.
Where to ask a question on Calico?
The best place to ask a question or get help from the community is the calico-users #slack. We also have an IRC channel.
