Calico Enterprise vs HPE Aruba Networking Fabric Composer

Calico Enterprise is a self-managed platform for network security and observability in Kubernetes clusters. It provides pod-to-pod networking within single clusters and across multiple clusters, with data-plane options including eBPF, nftables, iptables, Windows, and VPP. Cluster mesh connects clusters for pod communication and service discovery, while supporting policy enforcement and traffic visibility. Security controls include network- and application-layer policies, DNS policies, egress controls, and workload microsegmentation. It also provides workload-level IDS/IPS, a workload-focused WAF, and DDoS detection and prevention. For observability, Calico combines flow logs with Kubernetes context and offers network topology views, dashboards, alerts, and workload packet capture. Tigera lists support for PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, NIST, CCPA, and custom compliance frameworks, along with continuous monitoring and audit-ready reports. Policy deployment can integrate with CI/CD tools such as ArgoCD and Jenkins. The product supports hybrid deployment and centralized control, with BGP, IP-in-IP, VXLAN, WireGuard, TCP, UDP, SCTP, ICMP, ICMPv6, and HTTP listed as supported protocols.

HPE Aruba Networking Fabric Composer is a paid, API-based orchestration solution for day-to-day operations across rack-scale compute and storage infrastructure. It provides unified network and security management for HPE Aruba Networking CX platforms, including switch configurations and firewall policies. Guided workflows automate discovery, leaf-spine deployment, VSX, BGP or OSPF underlay, BGP EVPN overlay, VLAN groups, VRF, EVPN, firmware services, and micro-segmentation. Version 7.4.0 supports up to 500 switches. Integration packs include NetEdit, HPE iLO Amplifier, ODIM, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Prism, Pensando PSM, and VMware environments. Fabric Composer centrally orchestrates segmentation, stateless ACLs, and stateful distributed-firewall policies, with separate NetOps and SecOps roles for Aruba CX 10K switches. It is delivered as an ISO or virtual-machine OVA for virtual or physical hosts, running as one instance or a highly available three-node cluster. Audit logs record actions, users, roles, endpoints, and session details.