Tigera, creator of Calico Open Source, has announced the availability of Calico Container Networking Interface (CNI) for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Microsoft’s managed Kubernetes service. The release of Calico CNI means users can use Calico Open Source as a CNI for robust, scalable and higher performance networking for their environments. Calico supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments, giving users the ability to expand to those environments. Calico also provides a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) platform built on top of Calico, which enables organizations to provide active security for their container and Kubernetes environments. “We've been working with Microsoft for a number of years, and it just made perfect sense for us to extend our security policy capabilities, which are already available on Azure to also allow CNI capabilities. And we are the first vendor and probably right now the only vendor to offer CNI capabilities, in addition to the CNI that Microsoft provides,” says Utpal Bhatt, CMO of Tigera on the latest episode of TFiR Insights. Key highlights from this video interview are: A lot of the organizations adopting AKS are larger organizations with a combination of applications running in their own infrastructure on their servers and applications that are running in the cloud. Bhatt discusses why the needs of that multi-cluster hybrid environment are so critical for those types of organizations and what drove Tigera to bring CNI to AKS users. Security challenges are critical due to the microservices-based architecture which has a large attack surface. Bhatt explains how CNAPP aims to reduce the attack surface bringing the principles of zero trust to the platform. He explains how the policy engine that is built alongside Calico helps protect ingress and egress traffic. Bhatt explains the rich set of capabilities and key benefits of Calico CNI, the policy engine and CNAPP. He discusses how CNAPP provides a set of runtime security controls to identify zero day threats and micro segment their workloads for better security posture.