Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Snyk is a developer-first, cloud native security platform that scans for vulnerabilities across code, dependencies, containers, and infrastructure as code. Snyk does a great job of surfacing vulnerabilities in your codebase, but it can often be challenging to map these issues back to actual services and their owners. Fortunately, Snyk’s robust API can be used to tune Snyk to integrate into solutions designed to help engineering teams understand and improve their service-oriented architecture.

An IBM survey of IT executives, developer executives, and developers found that 87% of microservices users agreed that microservices adoption is worthwhile. Microservices are popular with both technology leaders and developers, making them a highly effective tool for businesses of all sizes. Microservices have many uses, and security is one area where micro services can both help — and harm.

Organizations are increasingly turning to microservices to facilitate their ongoing digital transformations. According to ITProPortal, more than three quarters (77%) of software engineers, systems and technical architects, engineers and decision makers said in a 2020 report that their organizations had adopted microservices. Almost all (92%) of those respondents reported a high level of success.

What is a microservice? Should you be using microservices? How are microservices related to containers and Kubernetes? If these things keep coming up in your day-to-day and you need an overview in 10 minutes, this blog post is for you. Fundamentally, a microservice is just a computer program which runs on a server or a virtual computing instance and responds to network requests.

Over the past few years enterprises and industry leaders have been steadily adopting microservices to drive their business forward. At this point, companies like Amazon, and Google, to name a few, must agree that the microservices style of architecture is much more than a passing trend. Along with the many benefits of updating monolith systems to microservices architecture, there are also new security challenges that organizations need to address.

Microservices and Kubernetes have completely changed the way we reason about network security. Luckily, Kubernetes network security policies (KNP) are a native mechanism to address this issue at the correct level of abstraction. Implementing a network policy is challenging, as developers and ops need to work together to define proper rules. However, the best approach is to adopt a zero trust framework for network security using Kubernetes native controls.

Microservices provide great benefits to development organizations. They enable multiple autonomous development teams to work on the same application, maintaining efficiency,speed, and utilization of modern resources such as open source, containers and programming languages. The Microservice paradigm simplifies application building,debugging, management, deployment, scalability and of course time to market.

While the move to microservices-based architecture is relatively new, it is already mainstream. A majority of companies are choosing it as their default architecture for new development,and you are not cool if you are not using microservices. With regards to migrating legacy apps and breaking them down to microservices, companies are showing more conservatism, and rightly so.

Alice keeps all her passwords in an Excel file on her desktop. However, she was told it is a very bad practice, since Eve can easily get access to the computer, read the file,and access Alice passwords and accounts. To enhance her security, Alice got a password protection software, KeePass, and she now saves all her passwords safely there – except for her KeePass password, which Alice keeps in an Excel file on her desktop. ‍Good news for Eve...

The backend developer team at Detectify has been working with Go for some years now, and it’s the language chosen by us to power our microservices. We think Go is a fantastic language and it has proven to perform very well for our operations. It comes with a great tool-set, such as the tool we’ll touch on later on called pprof. However, even though Go performs very well, we noticed one of our microservices had a behavior very similar to that of a memory leak.