Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Kubernetes adoption has rocketed into ubiquity. At this point, 96 percent of organizations are either using Kubernetes for container orchestration or evaluating its use, according to the latest Cloud Native Computing Foundation annual survey. But this doesn’t mean that Kubernetes isn’t without security risks. The flexibility of container applications and their capability to carry discrete components that interact over the network present security challenges.

Cloud computing and the use of cloud native architectures enable unparalleled performance, flexibility, and velocity. The speed of innovation has driven significant advancements across industries, but as digitalization continues pushing applications and services to the cloud, bad actors’ intrusion techniques have also become more sophisticated.

The rise of fintech has pushed traditional financial institutions to provide online-based services and launch fintech applications. But these services must be secure and meet certain regulatory requirements, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or SOC 2.

This time, we will see how to get a deeper integration between OPA and Kubernetes with Gatekeeper and native CRD-based policies.

Containers are a great way to package applications, with minimal libraries required. It guarantees that you will have the same deployment experience, regardless of where the containers are deployed. Container orchestration software pushes this further by preparing the necessary foundation to create containers at scale. Linux and Windows support containerized applications and can participate in a container orchestration solution.

Let's get our hands dirty with policy as code and write our first OPA policies for a Kubernetes environment.

Companies often see seasonal business spikes with periods of increased on-line demand or activity. To meet the changing application demands, Kubernetes has become the platform of choice to automatically scale web applications and infrastructure up and down. Autoscaling in Kubernetes adjusts the resources that are available to run the application or service, while minimizing the cost of those resources.