We are proud to partner with Fortinet and join their Fabric-Ready Technology Alliance Partner program. With this partnership, Fortinet customers will be able to extend their network security architecture to their Kubernetes environments. Our partnership was driven from interest from Fortinet’s customers to protect their Kubernetes based infrastructure. Kubernetes adoption is growing like wildfire and nearly every enterprise on the planet is at some stage of their Kubernetes journey.

“How do I enable GitOps for my network policies?” That is a common question we hear from security teams. Getting started with Kubernetes is relatively simple, but moving production workloads to Kubernetes requires alignment from all stakeholders – developers, platform engineering, network engineering, security. Most security teams already have a high-level security blueprint for their data centers.

Over my last two posts (part 1 and part 2), I have investigated user authentication in Kubernetes and how to create a single sign-on experience within the Kubernetes ecosystem. So far I have explained how Open ID Connect (OIDC) works, how to get started with OIDC and how to perform a login from the command line. The final piece of this puzzle is the Kubernetes dashboard, often used by our engineers alongside kubectl.

Researchers at Netflix and Google recently reported a vulnerability in the HTTP/2 protocol that enables adversaries to execute a DOS attack by legitimate use of the protocol. These types of attacks are very difficult to detect and mitigate because the traffic is valid HTTP/2 traffic. While HTTP/2 is a relatively new protocol it should be noted that even after several years of hardening we still see vulnerabilities for the TCP protocol like the recently reported SACK vulnerability.

IBM Cloud has made a massive shift to Kubernetes. From an initial plan for a hosted Kubernetes public cloud offering it has snowballed to tens of thousands of production Kubernetes clusters running across more than 60 data centers around the globe, hosting 90% of the PaaS and SaaS services offered by IBM Cloud. I spoke with Dan Berg, IBM Distinguished Engineer, to find out more about their journey, what triggered such a significant shift, and what they learned along the way.

When learning a new technology like Istio, it’s always a good idea to take a look at sample apps. Istio repo has a few sample apps but they fall short in various ways. BookInfo is covered in the docs and it is a good first step. However, it is too verbose with too many services for me and the docs seem to focus on managing the BookInfo app, rather than building it from ground up. There’s a smaller helloworld sample but it’s more about autoscaling than anything else.

AquaSec’s Daniel Sagi recently authored a blog post about DNS spoofing in Kubernetes. TLDR is that if you use default networking in Kubernetes you might be vulnerable to ARP spoofing which can allow pods to spoof (impersonate) the IP addresses of other pods. Since so much traffic is dialed via domain names rather than IPs, spoofing DNS can allow you to redirect lots of traffic inside the cluster for nefarious purposes.

We are excited to announce the general availability of Tigera Secure 2.5. With this release, security teams can now create and enforce security controls for Kubernetes using their existing firewall manager.

The radical shift towards DevOps and the continuous everything movement have changed how organizations develop and deploy software. As the consolidation and standardization of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes and tools occur in the enterprise, a standardized DevOps model helps organizations deliver faster software functionality at a large scale.

In the first two articles in this series about using serverless on an open source platform, I described how to get started with serverless platforms and how to write functions in popular languages and build components using containers on Apache OpenWhisk.Here in the third article, I’ll walk you through enabling serverless in your Kubernetes environment.