Innovative companies are looking to take advantage of cloud-native technologies beyond the data center to deliver faster innovation and competitive advantage at the edge. Recognizing the need for a common approach to create, deploy, run, secure, monitor, maintain and scale business logic and analytics applications wherever your business takes you, IBM today announced its edge computing offerings, including the IBM Edge Application Manager.

Chances are, if you’re not already moving applications to containers and Kubernetes, you’re considering it. However, it’s likely that security and compliance implications are something you haven’t fully thought through. Addressing container security risks later in the development life cycle negatively impacts the pace of cloud adoption while simultaneously raising security and compliance risks. The use of containers and Kubernetes changes your security calculus.

In this blog post, we’re going to explain how to monitor Open Policy Agent (OPA) Gatekeeper with Prometheus metrics. If you have deployed OPA Gatekeeper, monitoring this admission controller is as relevant as monitoring the rest of the Kubernetes control plane components, like APIserver, kubelet or controller-manager. If something breaks here, Kubernetes won’t deploy new pods in your cluster; and if it’s slow, your cluster scale performance will degrade.

It’s clear from the latest Cloud Native Computing Foundation survey that containerized environments have become mainstream, increasing automation at scale for companies. But, in the cloud-native environment, changes are constant and runtime is extremely dynamic. And while automation can help eliminate manual work, it can also replicate mistakes and risk at cloud scale.

Why the cloud-native architecture required a new policy language I recently started a new series on the Open Policy Agent (OPA) blog on why Rego, OPA’s policy language, looks and behaves the way it does. The blog post dives into the core design principles for Rego, why they’re important, and how they’ve influenced the language. I hope it will help OPA users better understand the language, so they can more easily jump into creating policy of their own.

In this post we will talk about using image scanning on admission controller to scan your container images on-demand, right before your workloads are scheduled in the cluster. Ensuring that all the runtime workloads have been scanned and have no serious vulnerabilities is not an easy task. Let’s see how we can block any pod that doesn’t pass the scanning policies before it even runs in your cluster.