What IT pros want from container security solutions

What capabilities do IT professionals need for container networking and security? That's what a new study from Tigera has set out to discover.

A survey of more than 1,200 users of the Calico Open Source container security platform finds the capabilities driving their adoption of Calico are, scalable networking (35 percent), security policies (35 percent), interoperability across different environments (33 percent) and encryption capabilities (30 percent).

The most popular policies deployed are, workload access policies that limit pod-to-pod communication (61 percent), secure egress/access policies (41 percent), microsegmentation policies (24 percent) and compliance policies (eight percent). 85 percent of users say they need to achieve network segmentation and protect east-west traffic.

"The State of Calico Open Source: Usage & Adoption Report findings show that developers understand the criticality of robust workload-centric network security for Kubernetes workloads," says Amit Gupta, chief product officer at Tigera. "Calico is a pivotal part of the container and Kubernetes ecosystem, and we are proud to bring industry-leading container networking and security capabilities to enterprises around the world."

Among other findings 59 percent of Calico users are using multiple clusters, 50 percent have clusters deployed in a hybrid cloud environment, 56 percent have an average cluster size of between 10 and 100 nodes, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is the most-used Kubernetes platform or service among Calico users.

The full report is available from the Tigera site.

Image credit: Melpomene / Shutterstock