System requirements

Node requirements

  • AMD64 processor

  • Linux kernel 3.10 or later with required dependencies. The following distributions have the required kernel, its dependencies, and are known to work well with Calico and host protection.

    • RedHat Linux 7
    • CentOS 7
    • CoreOS Container Linux stable
    • Ubuntu 16.04
    • Debian 8

Key/value store

Calico v3.1 requires a key/value store accessible by all Calico components. The key/value store must be etcdv3.

Network requirements

Calico requires the network to allow the following types of traffic.

Traffic Protocol Port
BGP TCP 179
IPIP* 4 n/a

* Our manifests enable IPIP by default. If you disable IPIP, you won’t need to allow IPIP traffic. Refer to Configuring IP-in-IP for more information.

Tip: On GCE, you can allow this traffic using firewall rules. In AWS, use EC2 security group rules.

Kernel dependencies

Tip: If you are using one of the recommended distributions, you will already satisfy these.

  • nf_conntrack_netlink subsystem
  • ip_tables (for IPv4)
  • ip6_tables (for IPv6)
  • ip_set
  • xt_set
  • ipt_set
  • ipt_rpfilter
  • ipt_REJECT
  • ipip (if using Calico networking)