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Clarify network policy and calico descriptions
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lxpollitt committed Jun 13, 2020
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Expand Up @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ Network security has several facets. The first involves the application of rule
+ Nitro Instances

## Network policy
Within a Kubernetes cluster, all Pod to Pod communication is allowed by default. While this flexibility may help promote experimentation, it is not considered secure. Kubernetes network policies give you a mechanism to restrict network traffic between Pods (often referred to as East/West traffic) and between Pods and external services. [Calico](https://docs.projectcalico.org/introduction/), is an open source policy engine from [Tigera](https://tigera.io) that works well with EKS. Network policies operate at layers 3 and 4 of the OSI model. Rules can comprise of a source and destination IP address, port number, protocol number, or a combination of these. Isovalent, the maintainers of [Cilium](https://cilium.readthedocs.io/en/stable/intro/), have extended the network policies to include partial support for layer 7 rules, e.g. HTTP. Cilium also has support for DNS hostnames which can be useful for restricting traffic between Kubernetes Services/Pods and resources that run within or outside of your VPC. By contrast, Tigera Enterprise includes a feature that allows you to map a Kubernetes network policy to an AWS security group.
Within a Kubernetes cluster, all Pod to Pod communication is allowed by default. While this flexibility may help promote experimentation, it is not considered secure. Kubernetes network policies give you a mechanism to restrict network traffic between Pods (often referred to as East/West traffic) and between Pods and external services. Kubernetes network policies operate at layers 3 and 4 of the OSI model. Network policies use pod selectors and labels to identify source and destination pods, but can also include IP addresses, port numbers, protocol number, or a combination of these. [Calico](https://docs.projectcalico.org/introduction/), is an open source policy engine from [Tigera](https://tigera.io) that works well with EKS. In addition to implementing the full set of Kubernetes network policy features, Calico supports extended network polices with a richer set of features, including support for layer 7 rules, e.g. HTTP, when integrated with Istio. Isovalent, the maintainers of [Cilium](https://cilium.readthedocs.io/en/stable/intro/), have also extended the network policies to include partial support for layer 7 rules, e.g. HTTP. Cilium also has support for DNS hostnames which can be useful for restricting traffic between Kubernetes Services/Pods and resources that run within or outside of your VPC. By contrast, Calico Enterprise includes a feature that allows you to map a Kubernetes network policy to an AWS security group, as well as DNS hostnames.

!!! attention
When you first provision an EKS cluster, the Calico policy engine is not installed by default. The manifests for installing Calico can be found in the VPC CNI repository at https://github.com/aws/amazon-vpc-cni-k8s/tree/master/config.
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