Container adoption in IT industry is on a dramatic growth. The surge in container adoption is the driving force behind the eagerness to get on board with the most popular orchestration platform around, organizations are jumping on the Kubernetes bandwagon to orchestrate and gauge their container workloads.

Usually, when you hear us going on about labels here at Tigera, we are mentioning them as targets for selectors for network policies. As a review, you might have a policy that says, “things labeled customerDB=server should allow traffic on 6443 from things labeled customerDB=client” In this example, the labels identify a resource being produced or consumed.

We recently had the opportunity to share the lessons we have learned about container security from deploying Kubernetes and OpenShift in the field. If you don’t have time to watch the full recording of our conversation, here are a few highlights.

Kubernetes is quickly becoming the de facto way to deploy workloads on distributed systems. In this post, I will help you develop a deeper understanding of Kubernetes by revealing some of the principles underpinning its design.

Deploying an application on Kubernetes can require a number of related deployment artifacts or spec files: Deployment, Service, PVCs, ConfigMaps, Service Account — to name just a few. Managing all of these resources and relating them to deployed apps can be challenging, especially when it comes to tracking changes and updates to the deployed application (actual state) and its original source (authorized or desired state).

Tigera is excited to announce several new capabilities with Tigera Secure Enterprise Edition 2.3, extending the ability to uncover sophisticated Kubernetes attacks. Tigera Anomaly Detection capabilities provide insight into unusual behaviors that compromise the security and performance of Kubernetes environments.

One of the great things about Kubernetes is that it completely separates authentication and authorization. Authentication (Authn) meaning the act of identifying who the user is and authorization (Authz) meaning the act of working out if they’re allowed to perform some action. This can be thought of in terms of a Passport and a Visa.

The open source revolution is back in full swing with the rise of Kubernetes. Flexibility and agility are the key factors to making the most of the cloud, multicloud, or hybrid cloud era. Kubernetes makes that easier by granting DevOps teams greater control across their infrastructure. But easier does not necessarily mean easy — there are still hurdles to overcome.

We are excited about Calico v3.5 release. This release provides more control and allows much finer-grained dynamic IP management vs the static allocation of a fixed set of addresses to each node in native Kubernetes. Here are the details.

One of the key Kubernetes security concepts is that workload identity is tied back to information that the orchestrator has. The orchestrator is actually the authoritative entity for what the actual workloads are in the platform. Kubernetes uses labels to select objects and to identify collections of objects that satisfy certain conditions. We, and others in the Kubernetes networking space, often talk about using Kubernetes ‘labels’ as identity bearers.