A startup called Tigera is combining open source projects from CoreOS and Metaswitch, seeking to combine them to discover container networking nirvana.
It's a slightly convoluted story that got announced during the startup's launch today. Tigera announced its presence with a presentation at CoreOS Fest in San Francisco.
Tigera's founders have been working on Project Calico, a complete Layer 3 stack that Metaswitch has offered to the community as open source.
They'll be combining Calico's network policy management with flannel, CoreOS's open source project related to container networking. Flannel creates a fabric that relies on etcd, an information-storage daemon for distributed systems. Etcd is the underpinning for Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration project.
Finally, the startup is taking the reins of the flannel and Calico projects, with the intention of combining them. The result will be yet another open source project, named Canal.
The bottom line is that Tigera is tackling the problem of container networking by assembling open source tools. The result would be a policy-based scheme for creating network overlays among containers.
Other container networking schemes include Docker Inc.'s libnetwork and Weaveworks' Weave.
Tigera is based in San Francisco. Its website doesn't give any specifics about funding, saying only that the company is "backed by leading Silicon Valley investors."
(UPDATE: Tigera tells us its lead investor is New Enterprise Associates (NEA).)