Tigera Unveils Calico Cloud Free Tier to Enhance Network Security and Observability for Kubernetes

New free tier offers advanced observability and network policy management capabilities, simplifying network security and microsegmentation for Calico Open Source users

SAN JOSE, Calif., May 22, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Tigera, the creator of Project Calico, the most widely adopted container networking and security solution, today announced the launch of the Calico Cloud Free Tier, available to Calico Open Source users. This latest product edition enables Calico Open Source users with a seamless way to access enhanced observability, policy management capabilities, microsegmentation and simplified network security functionality.

Calico Open Source makes Kubernetes networking and network security reliable, and scalable for all organizations. With the release of Calico Open Source 3.30, we introduced Calico Whisker to provide observability and troubleshooting for workload communication, staged network policies to enable strong microsegmentation controls and Calico Ingress Gateway to manage ingress traffic.

With the launch of the Calico Cloud Free Tier, we have advanced Calico Open Source's capabilities to tackle the ongoing challenges impacting Kubernetes operators and platform engineers. Calico Cloud Free Tier addresses key challenges such as limited workload communication observability for faster troubleshooting, management of complex network policy deployments, and implementing network policies for microsegmentation for improved security and compliance.

Calico Cloud Free Tier provides organizations leveraging Calico Open Source with:

• Deep Visibility with Service Graph: Platform teams can gain insights beyond Calico Open Source with Calico Dynamic Service Graph for comprehensive traffic monitoring, visualization of workload communication, logging, and rapid troubleshooting.
• Simplified Microsegmentation: Teams can implement comprehensive microsegmentation, by leveraging the included Policy Board to view enforced policies, staged policies to preview traffic flows before deployment, policy tiers that define policy enforcement hierarchy, and observability with Dynamic Service Graph.
• Intuitive Dashboards: Customers can utilize Calico Dashboards to easily conduct cluster health monitoring and flow log analysis.
• Simplified Network Policy Management: Teams can streamline network policy management workflows with Calico Policy Board, making it easier to view and manage tiered policies, create and edit policy rules, and stage and preview policy behavior.

"We are deeply committed to delivering solutions that enable the open source community to efficiently and securely scale Kubernetes environments," said Phil DiCorpo, Senior Director of Product Management at Tigera. "Calico Cloud Free Tier streamlines the adoption of robust Kubernetes networking and network security for platform teams. By offering key features such as enhanced visualization to view network flow logs, enforced and staged policies and policy recommendations at no cost, Calico Cloud Free Tier empowers teams to enhance cluster operations without added complexity or expense."

In addition to launching the Calico Cloud Free Tier, we are introducing additional enhancements to Calico Cloud. These include:

• Enhanced multi-cluster network security: Support for WireGuard encryption for data-in-transit between services in different clusters connected via Calico Cluster Mesh. It also can encrypt traffic between federated endpoints across clusters without needing to use a service mesh.
• Enhanced support for policy testing: Improved accuracy of policy preview by evaluating and reporting policy actions on new connections.

To learn more about Calico Cloud Free Tier, please visit: https://www.tigera.io/blog/whats-new-in-calico-spring-2025/

About Tigera
Tigera provides Calico, a unified network security and observability platform to prevent, detect and mitigate security breaches in Kubernetes clusters. Tigera's open-source offering, Calico Open Source, is the most widely adopted container networking and security solution.

Powering more than 100M containers across 8M+ nodes in 166 countries, Calico software is supported across all major cloud providers and Kubernetes distributions, and is used by leading companies including Discover, Chipotle, NBCUniversal, HanseMerkur, Box, Siemens Healthineers, Playtech, Royal Bank of Canada, and Bell Canada.

Media Contact
Katherine Benfield
ICR for Tigera
[email protected]

SOURCE Tigera