When deploying applications in containers, developers are now having to take on responsibilities related to operating system level security concerns. Often, these are unfamiliar topics that, in many cases, had previously been handled by operations and security teams. While this new domain can seem daunting there are various tools and practices that you can incorporate into your workflow to make sure you’re catching and fixing any issues before they get into production.

As part of Styra’s vision for unified authorization, we founded the Open Policy Agent project (OPA) to make policy-based control of the cloud-native stack accessible to everyone. OPA has now grown to become the de facto standard for authorization across the stack, leading to a large part of the community looking for ways to manage the OPA policy-as-code lifecycle.

The use of honeypots in an IT network is a well-known technique to detect bad actors within your network and gain insight into what they are doing. By exposing simulated or intentionally vulnerable applications in your network and monitoring for access, they act as a canary to notify the blue team of the intrusion and stall the attacker’s progress from reaching actual sensitive applications and data.

Open Policy Agent (OPA), now a graduated project from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, has become the open-source tool of choice for millions of users, who leverage it as a standard building block for policy and authorization across the cloud-native stack. Given the flexibility of OPA — with practically limitless deployment options — it has been adopted for dozens of use cases across hundreds of companies.

Integration with your source code managers and issuing pull requests to fix issues has been part of Snyk’s success in helping our customers fix application dependencies for several years. Now, we want to help you address container security in a similar way. We’re happy to share that we are extending Snyk Container by helping you automatically fix issues in your Dockerfile to keep an up-to-date base image at all times.

Have you shifted left, yet? That’s the big trend, isn’t it? It’s meant to signal a movement of security responsibilities, moving from central IT teams over to developers, but that’s trickier than it sounds. Simply taking tools that are intended for use by security experts and making them run earlier in the supply chain does not provide developers with meaningful information.

AWS Fargate is a technology that you can use with Amazon ECS to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters of Amazon EC2 instances. With AWS Fargate, you no longer have to provision, configure, or scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers. This removes the need to choose server types, decide when to scale your clusters, or optimize cluster packing. In short, users offload the virtual machines management to AWS while focusing on task management.

Judging by the reactions I saw in the audience during my past talks on “Securing Containers By Breaking In”, as well as recent reactions on Twitter, not many know about Docker Hub’s fairly recent multi-factor authentication feature. In October 2019, in order to improve the Docker Hub authentication mechanism, Docker rolled out a beta release of two-factor authentication (also known as 2FA).