A Detailed Look at Calico Cloud Free Tier

Why Calico Cloud Free Tier? What is Calico Cloud Free Tier? Enhanced Observability Simplified Microsegmentation Intuitive Dashboards Intelligent Policy Recommendations Seamless Path to Calico Cloud Free Tier How Calico Cloud Free Tier Enhances Calico Open Source Conclusion As Kubernetes environments grow in scale and complexity, platform teams face increasing pressure to secure workloads without slowing down application delivery. But managing and enforcing network policies in Kubernetes is notoriously difficult—especially when visibility into pod-to-pod communication is limited or nonexistent. Teams are often forced to rely on manual traffic inspection, standalone logs, or trial-and-error policy changes, increasing the risk of misconfiguration and service disruption. Safe policy management and microsegmentation becomes a daunting task without clear knowledge or insight into which services should communicate with each other. In this detailed look, we’ll explore how Calico Cloud Free Tier builds upon Calico Open Source , and helps platform teams visualize traffic with a dynamic service graph, simplifies policy management, and even analyzes actual traffic to recommend policies. Calico Cloud Free Tier is a managed SaaS, no-cost offering that extends the capabilities of Calico Open Source 3.30 and higher to help Kubernetes teams improve network visibility, simplify policy management, and improve security by simplifying microsegmentation. Designed for single-cluster environments, it provides platform engineers and operators with powerful observability and policy management tools. With a seamless onboarding experience for users already running Calico Open Source 3.30 or higher, Calico Cloud Free Tier empowers teams to take control of their Kubernetes traffic—without additional cost or vendor lock-in. Let’s take a closer look at the key features that make Calico Cloud Free Tier a powerful solution for Kubernetes network security and observability: Calico’s primary observability solution is Dynamic Service Graph , a powerful visualization tool that maps real-time pod-to-pod communication across your cluster. This Service Graph, which is available in Calico Cloud Free Tier, gives you an immediate understanding of how workloads interact, making it far easier to identify unexpected traffic patterns or missing connections. Need to troubleshoot a failed service call? Simply drill down into the graph to access real-time flow logs with detailed packet and policy metadata. This eliminates the guesswork from debugging and speeds up root-cause analysis dramatically.