Kubernetes version 1.22, the latest release of Kubernetes, comes with bug fixes, enhancements, and new features that make the platform more stable, scalable, and user-friendly. There are a total of 56 improvements with different maturity levels and a considerable number of API removals. In this article, I’ll focus on the security-related changes in Kubernetes as well as a few other significant changes in Kubernetes API and usability.

Kubernetes helps with scaling, deploying, and managing containerized workloads, facilitating a faster deployment cycle and configuration management—all while providing improved access control.Kubernetes is also a CNCF project, meaning it’s cloud-native and can be easily deployed through any cloud provider. This blog will compare on-premises, or self-hosted,Kubernetes clusters to managed ones, as well as outline your options for Kubernetes in the cloud.

In Kubernetes, the task of scheduling pods to specific nodes in the cluster is handled by the kube-scheduler. The default behavior of this component is to filter nodes based on the resource requests and limits of each container in the created pod. Feasible nodes are then scored to find the best candidate for the pod placement. In many scenarios, scheduling pods based on resource constraints is a desired behavior.

Service mesh technology emerged with the popularization of microservice architectures. Because service mesh facilitates the separation of networking from the business logic, it enables you to focus on your application’s core competency. Microservice applications are distributed over multiple servers, data centers, or continents, making them highly network dependent.

Around 20 years ago I had the privilege of joining a young company that invented the Firewall – Check Point. I learned most of my networking knowledge and skills at Check Point and, at that time, I was involved in the high end, rapidly evolving internet. This might be the reason why I truly believe that network security must be a layer in the overall security strategy. A few years ago, I came back to Check Point as a cloud security product manager.

As you may have heard, a massive breach of Microsoft Exchange servers was revealed in the last several weeks. The attack is not over yet. We can always wait for another attack and blame another vendor, but when it comes to Microsoft, well, who can we rely on after that? SolarWinds, Centreon and now Microsoft Exchange… With almost 80% enterprise market share, the Exchange holds the biggest secrets of our times, and now nobody knows where they went.

Kubernetes secrets are the nativere sources for storing and managing sensitive data, like passwords, cloud access keys, or authentication tokens. You need to distribute this information across your Kubernetes clusters and protect it at the same time. When sending your password to each node in your cluster, it’s critical to ensure that only authorized entities—users, services, or workloads—are able to access it.

As a product manager, I am always concern about the value my customers will get from the product, and this is my main focus. In order to achieve this, I often meet with customers and talk about pain points, problems,offer a solution, see how the product can help. In the past few years, one of the items that get raised in these discussions is not related to any pain pointor feature requirement, it is the attachment method when dealing with K8s security.

Enabling enclaves-based security is key for enterprise cloud adoption General availability of Nitro Enclaves, recently announced by AWS, is Amazon’s way of delivering confidential computing to its customers. Following similar announcements by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, AWS announcement further confirms growing demand for additional runtime protection of customer’s data and other intellectual properties.

The latest exploit in the series of issues with cloud infrastructure software is called “ContainerDrip” (CVE-2020-15157)and in some cases it can cause you to leak your registry secrets to an attacker. The attack is actually a kind of secret or password leak using request forgery. Your client unintentionally makes an HTTP API request to the attacker’s endpoint where this request contains the container image registry secret.