The network is foundational to distributed application environments. A distributed application has multiple microservices, each running in a set of pods often located on different nodes. Problem areas in a distributed application can be in network layer connectivity (think network flow logs), or application resources unavailability (think metrics), or component unavailability (think tracing).
Companies are leveraging the power of Kubernetes to accelerate the delivery of resilient and scalable applications to meet the pace of business. These applications are highly dynamic, making it operationally challenging to securely connect to databases or other resources protected behind firewalls.
Kubernetes has become the world’s most popular container orchestration system and is taking the enterprise ecosystem by storm. At this disruptive moment it’s useful to look back and review the security threats that have evolved in this dynamic landscape. Identifying these threats and exploits and being a proactive learner may save you a lot of time and effort…as well as help you retain your reputation in the long run.
Tigera is pleased to announce that we have open-sourced Calico for Windows and made it immediately available for all to use for free. With the launch of open-source Calico for Windows, the vast ecosystem of Windows users now has unprecedented access to Kubernetes via the industry’s de-facto standard for Kubernetes networking and network security.
A few days ago, our team released Calico v3.16. As part of that release, we have marked the eBPF dataplane as “GA”, signalling that it is now stable and ready for wider use by the community. In this blog post I want to take you through the process of moving from tech-preview to GA.
Tigera serves the networking and policy enforcement needs of more than 150,000 Kubernetes clusters across the globe and supports two product lines: open source Calico, and Calico Enterprise. Our development team is constantly running smoke, system, unit, and functional verification tests, as well as all our E2Es for these products. Our CI pipelines form an extremely important aspect of the overall IT infrastructure and enable us to test our products and catch bugs before release.
The old security model, which followed the “trust but verify” method, is broken. That model granted excessive implicit trust that attackers abused, putting the organization at risk from malicious internal actors and allowing unauthorized outsiders wide-reaching access once inside. The new model, Zero Trust networking, presents an approach where the default posture is to deny access.
Compromising a pod in a Kubernetes cluster can have disastrous consequences on resources in an AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) account if access to the Instance Metadata service is not explicitly blocked. The Instance Metadata service is an AWS API listening on a link-local IP address. Only accessible from EC2 instances, it enables the retrieval of metadata that is used to configure or manage an instance.
In today’s economy, digital assets (applications, data, and processes) determine business success. Cloud-native applications are designed to iterate rapidly, creating rapid time-to-value for businesses. Organizations that are able to rapidly build and deploy their applications have significant competitive advantage.
Hybrid cloud infrastructures run critical business resources and are subject to some of the strictest network security controls. Irrespective of the industry and resource types, these controls broadly fall into three categories. Workloads (pods) running on Kubernetes are ephemeral in nature, and IP-based controls are no longer effective. The challenge is to enforce the organizational security controls on the workloads and Kubernetes nodes themselves.
