Project Calico represents a new approach to virtual networking, based on the same scalable IP networking principles as the Internet. Unlike other virtual networking approaches, Calico does not use overlays, instead providing a pure Layer 3 approach to data center networking. Calico is simple to deploy and diagnose, provides a rich security policy, supports both IPv4 and IPv6 and can be used across a combination of bare-metal, VM and container workloads.
Calico implements a highly efficient vRouter in each compute node that leverages the existing Linux kernel forwarding engine without the need for vSwitches. Each vRouter propagates workload reachability information (routes) to the rest of the data center using BGP – either directly in small scale deployments or via BGP route reflectors to reach Internet level scales in large deployments.
Calico peers directly with the data center’s physical fabric (whether L2 or L3) without the need for on/off ramps, NAT, tunnels, or overlays.
Calico supports rich and flexible network policy which it enforces using bookended ACLs on each compute node to provide tenant isolation, security groups, and external reachability constraints.
For more information see the Project Calico website.
To get started on OpenStack follow the instructions in our docs. To get started on Docker follow the instructions in the calico-docker repo.
Technical documentation is at http://docs.projectcalico.org/. For information about contributing to Calico itself, see the section titled 'Contributing' below.
There are two options for getting support for Calico. You can simply get in contact and ask any question you like – there is an active group of users and developers who will usually try their best to help you or point you in the right direction. Or you can work with one of the commercial vendors and system integrators who provide installation, integration, customization and support services for Calico.
Currently, we are aware of the following vendors who provide commercial support services:
- Metaswitch Networks.
Please contact us if you are a vendor providing commercial support services and wish to be added to this list.
Project Calico was founded by Metaswitch Networks, who also contributed the original implementation to open source and are responsible for the ongoing management of the project. However, it is open to any members of the community – individuals or organizations – to get involved and contribute code.
Please contact us if you are interested in getting involved and contributing to the project.
Thanks for thinking about contributing to Project Calico! The success of an open source project is entirely down to the efforts of its contributors, so we do genuinely want to thank you for even thinking of contributing.
Before you do so, you should check out our contributing guidelines in the
CONTRIBUTING.md file, to make sure it's as easy as possible for us to accept
your contribution.
It's great that you're interested! In additional to being able to install Calico from packages, you can install the source directly. If you want to work on the code, we recommend installing the source directly in a Python virtual environment. In your virtual environment, switch to the directory containing the code and type:
pip install -e .
This will install the code and all its dependencies, except for Neutron or Docker dependencies. This is all you need to work on Felix. If you want to work on our OpenStack plugin, you'll also need to install Neutron: doing that is outside the scope of this article. If you want to work on Docker integration please see the calico-docker repo.
To run the unit tests, you'll also need to type:
pip install nose mock
Then, still at the root of the calico directory, run:
nosetests
If you only want to hack on one or two components you may not want to install
the dependencies for the others. To do that, you can set the $CALICODEPS
environment variable before installing the code. Set the variable to a
comma-separated list of the names of the components you want to install the
dependencies for.
For example, if you want to work on Felix, you will want to set it to felix.
With that set, you can then run pip install -e ., which will install the
subset of the dependencies needed for those components.