The timeline of an application can be broadly described in 3 phases: Thus, runtime security in the context of a cloud-native container environment broadly refers to the tools and processes leveraged to protect the operation of running containers in production.
In my previous blog post, What you can’t do with Kubernetes network policies (unless you use Calico): TLS Encryption, I talked about use case number two from the list of 9 things you cannot implement using basic Kubernetes network policy—anything TLS related. In this blog post, we’ll be focusing on use case number three: node specific policies.
In the vast digital landscape, the flow of data across networks is akin to water coursing through a city’s plumbing system. Just as impurities in water can signal potential issues, deviations in network traffic, termed as network inserted anomalies, can hint at cyber threats. These anomalies range from overt signs like unauthorized access attempts to subtler indicators like unusual data transfer patterns.
According to the CNCF annual survey released in 2022, 96% of organizations are using or evaluating Kubernetes as a platform for their containerized workloads. Containerization has gained popularity as it fosters DevOps culture and provides the agility and flexibility required for faster software release cycles. Kubernetes has crossed the “adoption chasm” to become a mainstream global technology, emerging as the operating system for the cloud.
The integration of cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes with public cloud platforms like Amazon EKS has ushered in a new era of scalable and efficient application deployments. However, this combination brings forth unique security challenges, especially concerning container images. Enter Calico Cloud’s Image Assurance – a comprehensive tool designed to bolster the security of your containerized applications on Amazon EKS.
Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a popular managed Kubernetes option that allows customers to benefit from both an offloaded Kubernetes management plane, and the wide range of services that AWS offers. Managed or unmanaged, securing cluster traffic is always critical and, although AWS Security Groups can secure the cluster nodes, securing pod traffic requires something closer to the application data-path.
Securing your Kubernetes environment and workloads is paramount in today’s digital landscape. Calico is the industry’s only active security platform with full-stack observability for containers and Kubernetes. Calico prevents, detects, troubleshoots, and automatically mitigates exposure risks of security breaches across multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and hybrid deployments.
As organizations adopt Microsoft AKS at scale, they need to enforce namespace or even workload-based isolation for better security and compliance. This isolation, often referred to as microsegmentation, can help prevent the lateral movement of threats inside Kubernetes clusters, achieve compliance by limiting communication across workloads or namespaces, and enable multi-tenancy by limiting communication.
Enterprises implementing containers and Kubernetes in either corporate datacenters or cloud environments typically employ Checkpoint Quantum to secure traffic between their datacenter networks and Checkpoint CloudGuard to safeguard their cloud resources. Often these network security perimeter focused solutions are also used to scrutinize traffic originating from Kubernetes clusters.
Firewall technology for network security has undergone considerable advancement with the introduction of cloud computing and the vanishing network perimeter with hybrid and multi-cloud environments. All along this transformation one thing that did not change is the way endpoints are identified – through the TCP/IP stack, specifically the IP address. This design principle needed a change for container-based applications. How did the NGFWs fare?
