Ensuring Kubernetes Security: A Collaborative Journey for Developers and Operators
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Kubernetes Security is one of the most critical aspects today in IT world. Kubernetes has become the backbone of modern infrastructure management, allowing organizations to scale and deploy containerized applications with ease. However, the power of Kubernetes also brings forth the responsibility of ensuring robust security measures are in place. This responsibility cannot rest solely on the shoulders of developers or operators alone. It demands a collaborative effort where both parties work together to mitigate potential risks and vulnerabilities.
Even though DevOps and Platform Engineering approaches are pretty standard, there are still tasks responsible for different teams, even though nowadays you have platform and project teams.
Here you will see three easy ways to improve your Kubernetes security from both dev and ops perspectives:
No Vulnerabilities in Container Images
Vulnerability Scan on Container Images is something crucial in nowadays developments because the number of components deployed on the system has grown exponentially, and also the opacity of them as well. Vulnerabilities Scan using tools such as Trivy or the integrated options in our local docker environments such as Docker Desktop or Rancher Desktop is mandatory, but how can you use it to make your application more secure?
- Developer’s responsibility:
- Use only allowed standard base images, well-known
- Reduce, at minimum, the number of components and packages to be installed with your application (better Alpine than Debian)
- Use a Multi-Stage approach to only include what you will need in your images.
- Run a vulnerability scan locally before pushing
- Operator’s responsibility:
- Force to download all base images for the corporate container registry
- Enforce vulnerability scan on push, generating alerts and avoiding deployment if the quality criteria are unmet.
- Perform regular vulnerability scans for runtime images and generate incidents for the development teams based on the issues discovered.
