"Never before has this level of security been offered through the full lifecycle of building, deploying and running cloud-native applications," said Tigera president and CEO Ratan Tipirneni.

"It's not about just finding the most vulnerabilities; it's about reducing the broad attack surface with zero-trust and actively mitigating risks with the combination of preventive measures, combining behavioural baselining and known threats knowledge to detect anomalous activity at runtime and the ability to remediate risks in real time."

According to Tigera, the combination of cloud-native applications, open-source software, agile development, and skills shortages has led to widening security gaps and hence exposure to attacks.

Cloud-native application protection platforms help by detecting vulnerabilities and zero-day threats, the company says Calico Cloud is one of a few that reduce attack surfaces and mitigate risks.

Calico Cloud's new scanning engine continuously assesses images for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, correlating the results to provide a real-time view of the images running in Kubernetes clusters and any associated risks.

At build and deploy time, Calico Cloud's admission controller can automatically block the deployment of pods containing high-severity vulnerabilities.

Continuous monitoring of images, workloads, and Kubernetes infrastructure against common configuration security standards generates detailed assessment reports that can be fed into CI/CD pipelines or incident response workflows for remediation, and the dynamic service and threat graph provides live visualisation of communication between services, namespaces, and workloads for faster troubleshooting.

Calico Cloud provides zero-trust workload access controls, identity-aware microsegmentation, integration with firewalls and security information and event management tools, and runtime threat defence for containerised workloads that collects activity data across network traffic, file system, processes, sys calls, binaries, and more, applying machine learning to protect against zero-day threats.

Other features include workload-level intrusion detection and prevention, deep packet inspection, distributed denial-of-service attack prevention, web application firewall, and an integrated security policy engine.

Calico Cloud and Calico Enterprise (the self-hosted version) are available immediately. Calico Cloud prices start at US$0.05 per node hour. A 14-day free trial of Calico Cloud is available.