Containers are a standardized software packaging format that provides a predictable, replicable way to run applications. Container isolation is one of the primary benefits of containerized applications. Using containers enables us to isolate our software from its environment, increasing consistency and reliability across our development and staging environments. You’re probably familiar with — or are using — Docker containers.
Whether you’re learning cloud-native workload protection for the first time or running all your microservice workloads in production, you probably already noticed that cloud-native security is much different from security design used for traditional monolith applications. The dramatic increase in complexity and the evolving threat landscape make cloud and container security even more critical and harder to manage.
Today we’re announcing a new container security cheat sheet and report — created in collaboration with our partner Sysdig. Download cheatsheet In this post, we’ll outline tips to help you successfully navigate the challenges of container security with a focus on three core principles: Traditional security approaches are incapable of handling the distributed and ephemeral nature of containers.
Distributed containerized systems compose applications, resources, services, databases, and other artifacts. These components often need sensitive information such as user keys, passwords, API keys, and certificates to function properly. Secrets management is critical for adequately handling sensitive information and Kubernetes deployments often utilize their built-in Secrets resource type and associated RBAC controls but what if you aren’t deploying on Kubernetes?
During many recent security incidents, we hear a lot of messages about the lack of knowledge of the code dependencies, attacks to the software supply chain, Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), digital signatures, provenance, attestation, etc. The fact is, every time a new vulnerability appears in the landscape, we usually need to spend a lot of time and effort to detect the real impact on the applications and services that are running in our environment.
As technology explodes, so do the threats. Point solutions emerge as security players innovate in order to keep up. This creates the need for consolidation, as the fragmented solutions become too much to manage. We’re entering a consolidation phase now, the process of distilling, refining, and letting the cream rise to the top. We sat down with cybersecurity veteran and vigilante, Chris Wysopal, to get his perspective on emerging trends in cloud-native security.
Kubernetes provides an interface to run distributed systems smoothly. It takes care of scaling and failover for your applications, provides deployment patterns, and more. Regarding security, it’s the teams deploying workloads onto the Kubernetes cluster that have to consider which workloads they want to monitor for their application security requirements.
Containerization is a rapidly evolving technology in cloud-native applications. Just like computing systems, containers consist of packages of software programs with all the vital elements like binaries, files, and libraries for running an application in the environment from anywhere. Containers are lightweight, and DevOps teams develop applications and deploy services using them. Moreover, organizations also use these containers to deploy and scale the DevOps infrastructure like the CI/CD tools.
