Lab

Migrating from Calico

In this lab, you will learn how you can safely migrate your cluster to Cilium.

🚚 Migrating from Calico

Migrating to Cilium from another CNI is a very common task. But how do we minimize the impact during the migration? How do we ensure pods on the legacy CNI can still communicate to Cilium-managed pods during the migration? How do we execute the migration safely, while avoiding a overly complex approach or using a separate tool such as Multus?

With the use of the new Cilium CRD CiliumNodeConfig, running clusters can be migrated on a node-by-node basis, without disrupting existing traffic or requiring a complete cluster outage or rebuild.

In this lab, you will migrate your cluster from an existing CNI to Cilium. While we use Calico in this simple lab, you can leverage the same approach for other CNIs.

Note that this feature is still beta and we expect further tooling and automation to be developed to support large cluster migrations.

• 🚀 The Lab Environment

  Explore the lab's environment

• 🗂️ Cluster Preparation

  Let's prepare our cluster for the migration to Cilium.

• 🚚 Migration

  Let's migrate from Calico to Cilium.

• 🏁 Post-Migration

  Let's perform these steps once the cluster is fully migrated.