Packet Bare Metal Cloud Announces Support for Calico Networking

December 14, 2015 - Packet is pleased to announce support for Project Calico's container network automation throughout its bare metal cloud platform, enabling highly performant, secure and scalable network automation for OpenStack, Docker, OpenShift, Mesos and Kubernetes.

"Calico's pure layer 3 approach to networking is attractive to our automation focused customers," said Zachary Smith, CEO of Packet. "Adding support for Calico in our on-demand physical compute cloud helps customers leverage the performance of our bare metal network with instant route propagation of IPv4 and IPv6 address space."

With dynamic networking becoming a requirement for private clouds and container platforms, Packet found that API-driven address management was simply not enough for modern workload platforms such as Docker. Project Calico and its proven, at-scale route control, made for a great addition to the Packet platform.

"Project Calico is thrilled to work with Packet on supporting our open-source, scalable networking technology within their bare metal public cloud platform." said Christopher Liljenstolpe, Evangelist at Project Calico. "The combination of high performance bare metal networks and Calico's secure, scalable layer-3 approach to network automation is a game changer for production container and VM workloads."

Using Calico on the Packet platform, clients are able to manage security policy and container address portability on Packet's native IP backbone, without the performance bottlenecks and operational complexity of other available options, which require an "overlay" of tunnel encapsulation on top of the physical network. Container applications can span multiple datacenters or routed boundaries on the Packet network, with IP addressing propagated using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGPv4).

Adam Rothschild, SVP of Infrastructure at Packet, agrees: "Unlike many overlay solutions, Calico's use of IP routing protocols leverages technologies that have proven effective over time, at Internet scale. This approach presents a unique option that's elegantly simple, and yet powerful, which we are thrilled to provide to our users."

Calico support is available in beta at Packet. Please email help@packet.net to enable Calico features on your Packet account.

About Packet
At Packet, we're out to build a better internet by supercharging the container revolution with smart, API-driven bare metal and a never-congested network. Our platform brings public cloud style automation to bare metal: deploy dedicated servers in just minutes; always available, and program against them via API, cloud-init, and dozens of integrations. Learn more at www.packet.net.

About Project Calico
Calico's pure L3 approach to data center networking integrates seamlessly with cloud orchestration systems to enable secure IP communication between virtual machines, containers, or bare metal workloads. Find out more at www.projectcalico.org.

Media Inquiries: +1 (212) 933-9785; pr@packet.net