97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know

Chapter 29. Security at Cloud Native Speed

Chris Short

Principal Technical Marketing Manager at Red Hat

Cloud native technologies, like Kubernetes, are chosen by organizations to create a competitive advantage. Containers, service meshes, and serverless computing aim to jumpstart developer productivity. But they can change the attack surface of applications and infrastructure. We must protect cloud provider APIs, developer tooling, and applications. The good news is that we can use native Kubernetes tooling and cultural changes, like DevOps, to improve security postures and reduce the blast radius, all while improving developer productivity.

Struggles

Doing less with more is now the modus operandi for many organizations, which are moving toward cloud native infrastructure because they need to make improvements faster. Airbnb became a Marriott competitor almost overnight. Square and Stripe have changed the way ecommerce works. It’s hard to imagine being an established organization and not worrying about market share.

People look to cloud native tooling to improve velocity, but the ecosystem contains a vast expanse of tools from many organizations. One glance at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation landscape tells the story: it has an overwhelming array of tools in categories like service discovery, CI/CD, storage, and many more.

Velocity

According to a recent industry report ...