What’s New in Calico: Winter 2026 Release

AI-Powered Intelligence and Enhanced Observability Dashboard for the Calico Ingress Gateway Identifying and Cleaning Up Unused Policies with “Last Evaluated” Metrics Deterministic Matching for Overlapping NetworkSets Streamlining Multi-Cluster Management with Projects Hierarchy Expanding Hybrid Cloud Reach with New OS Support for VMs Get Started with Calico AI Powered Intelligence, Unified Traffic Observability and Scalable Infrastructure Management As anyone managing one or more Kubernetes clusters knows by now, scaling can introduce an exponentially growing number of problems. The sheer volume of metrics, logs and other data can become an obstacle, rather than an asset, to effective troubleshooting and overall cluster management. Fragmented tools and manual troubleshooting processes introduce operational complexity leading to the inevitable security gaps and extended downtime. As the number of clusters grows it becomes more important than ever to find ways of reducing the observability noise, decluttering the monitoring stack and eliminating the bottlenecks that get in the way of keeping your clusters stable and secure. The Winter 2026 release of Calico Enterprise and Calico Cloud addresses the pain points of scaling clusters with three key enhancements: AI Assistant for Calico: Efficiently navigate disparate data sources to quickly get answers through natural language, or proactively identify problems before they arise. Unified Ingress Gateway Dashboard : Monitor gateway traffic volume, latency, and request behavior alongside east-west traffic observability. Last Evaluated Policy Metrics : Identify and decommission unused security policies to maintain a lean, least-privileged posture. Deterministic NetworkSet Matching : Ensure stable policy enforcement in large environments with predictable, namespace-aware lookups. Projects Hierarchy : Connect and organize an unlimited number of clusters with self-service grouping and regional data residency compliance. Expanded OS Support : Extend unified security policies to traditional workloads with official support for Debian and Ubuntu on VMs. AI-Powered Intelligence Understanding what is going on in a Kubernetes cluster is a challenge for most, if not all, platform and DevOps teams. Calico Cloud provides an abundance of networking and security telemetry from flow logs, metrics, service connectivity, and policy evaluation events across workloads, namespaces, and clusters.