Calico

Scalable, high-performance networking and security for cloud-native workloads

Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Calico delivers fast, low-CPU container networking and granular security across Kubernetes, VMs, bare metal, and Windows, supporting eBPF, BGP, VXLAN, and WireGuard for global scale.

Overview

Highlights

Multiple data‑plane options (eBPF, Linux, Windows, VPP)

Cross‑environment interoperability – clouds, bare metal, VMs

High‑performance, low‑CPU networking with BGP/VXLAN

Fine‑grained security policies and WireGuard encryption

Pros

Proven scalability – millions of nodes in production
Broad OS and platform support
Active contributor community with over 200 members
Optimized for low CPU usage

Managed products teams compare with

When teams consider Calico, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.

Datadog APM

Cloud APM with code-level distributed tracing and correlation to logs/metrics.

Dynatrace Application Monitoring

AI-assisted APM with automated discovery and root-cause analysis.

IBM Instana APM

Real-time APM and distributed tracing for microservices.

Looking for a hosted option? These are the services engineering teams benchmark against before choosing open source.

Fit guide

Great for

Large‑scale Kubernetes deployments across multiple clouds and on‑prem
Organizations needing granular network policies and encrypted pod traffic

How teams use it

Multi‑cloud Kubernetes networking

Unified pod communication across AWS, GCP, and on‑prem with consistent policies

Secure pod‑to‑pod traffic

Identity‑aware policies enforced with optional WireGuard encryption

High‑performance data plane

eBPF deployment reduces node CPU consumption while increasing throughput

Hybrid workloads integration

Seamless networking and security for containers, VMs, and Windows nodes

Tech snapshot

Go87%

Python5%

TypeScript2%

Shell2%

C2%

Makefile1%

Frequently asked questions

What data planes does Calico support?

Calico offers eBPF, standard Linux, Windows, and VPP data planes.

Does Calico provide network security?

Yes, it includes granular network policies and optional WireGuard encryption.

Can Calico run on bare metal and clouds?

It works across multiple distros, public clouds, bare metal, and virtual machines.

What language is Calico written in?

The core project is primarily written in Go.

Is Calico open source and under what license?

Calico is open source under the Apache‑2.0 license.

Project at a glance

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LicenseApache-2.0

Repo age9 years old

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Primary languageGo

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