There has been a huge uptick in microservices adoption in the data analytics domain, primarily aided by machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) projects. Some of the reasons why containers are popular among ML developers is the ease of portability, scalability, and quick access to data using services—specifically network services. The rise of cloud-native applications, especially for big data in the analytics sector, makes these applications a prime target for cyber crime.

The rise of cloud native and containerization, along with the automation of the CI/CD pipeline, introduced fundamental changes to existing application development, deployment, and security paradigms. Because cloud native is so different from traditional architectures, both in how workloads are developed and how they need to be secured, there is a need to rethink our approach to security in these environments.

Calico Cloud has just celebrated its 1-year anniversary! And what better way to celebrate than to launch new features and capabilities that help users address their most urgent cloud security needs. Over the past year, the Tigera team has seen rapid adoption of Calico Cloud for security and observability of cloud-native applications.

First-generation security solutions for cloud-native applications have been failing because they apply a legacy mindset where the focus is on vulnerability scanning instead of a holistic approach to threat detection, threat prevention, and remediation. Given that the attack surface of modern applications is much larger than in traditional apps, security teams are struggling to keep up and we’ve seen a spike in breaches.

Like any great technology, the interest in and adoption of Kubernetes (an excellent way to orchestrate your workloads, by the way) took off as cloud native and containerization grew in popularity. With that came a lot of confusion. Everyone was using Kubernetes to move their workloads, but as they went through their journey to deployment, they weren’t thinking about security until they got to production.

When deploying cloud-native applications to a hybrid and multi-cloud environment that is protected by traditional perimeter-based firewalls, such as Palo Alto Networks (PAN) Panorama, you need to work within the confines of your existing IT security architecture. For applications that communicate with external resources outside the Kubernetes cluster, a traditional firewall is typically going to be part of that communication.

If you have access to the internet, it’s likely that you have already heard of the critical vulnerability in the Log4j library. A zero-day vulnerability in the Java library Log4j, with the assigned CVE code of CVE-2021-44228, has been disclosed by Chen Zhaojun, a security researcher in the Alibaba Cloud Security team. It’s got people worried—and with good reason.

Last June, Tigera announced a first for Kubernetes: supporting open-source WireGuard for encrypting data in transit within your cluster. We never like to sit still, so we have been working hard on some exciting new features for this technology, the first of which is support for WireGuard on AKS using the Azure CNI. First a short recap about what WireGuard is, and how we use it in Calico.

Cloud-native transformations come with many security and troubleshooting challenges. Real-time intrusion detection and the prevention of continuously evolving threats is challenging for cloud-native applications in Kubernetes. Due to the ephemeral nature of pods, it is difficult to determine source or destination endpoints and limit their blast radius. Traditional perimeter-based firewalls are not ideal fit for Kubernetes and containers.

In this blog post, I will be talking about label standard and best practices for Kubernetes security. This is a common area where I see organizations struggle to define the set of labels required to meet their security requirements. My advice is to always start with a hierarchical security design that is capable of achieving your enterprise security and compliance requirements, then define your label standard in alignment with your design.