With the exponential increase in container adoption, it's more critical than ever for teams to ensure that proper security and threat management infrastructure and practices are in place. This Refcard presents a comprehensive examination of threat detection for containerized environments, spanning several focus areas such as common cloud security architectures and Kubernetes hardening guidelines. And central to this Refcard are the fundamentals of container threat detection, including concepts like resource limits, static image vulnerability scanning, configuration validation, and much more.
What Is GitOps and Why Is it Important for an Organization?
GitOps is a model to automate and manage infrastructure and applications. This is done by using the same DevOps best practices that many teams already use, such as version control, code review, and CI/CD pipelines. While implementing DevOps, we've found ways to automate the software development lifecycle, but when it comes to infrastructure setup and deployments, it's still mostly a manual process. With GitOps, teams can automate the infrastructure provisioning process. This is due to the ability to write your Infrastructure as Code (IaC), version the code in a Git repository, and apply continuous deployment principles to your cloud delivery.
Ever since virtualization support went mainstream, developers have started to embrace containerization as a means of enhancing app security. And when used well, it's an excellent approach. Unfortunately, countless things can destroy the security benefits of containerization when overlooked.
But, short of taking some additional coursework on the subject, there aren't many places you can go to learn about the best practices of containerization. And since Docker is the most popular containerization option in the world right now, that seems like a natural place to start. Here are five simple containerization security tips to help you keep your Dockerized apps secure.
Containerization is more than just the way forward. It is now the norm rather than the exception; all new apps are designed to leverage cloud-native features, with microservices running in containers. Containerization has enabled applications to run with immense efficiency and scalability, but the use of containers is not without its challenges.
Until very recently, the most prominent container engine was Docker. Even those running Kubernetes still rely on Docker containers as a way to orchestrate their applications. Today, however, Docker has a serious contender: Podman. Unlike Docker, which relies on daemons, Podman runs directly using runC runtime containers.
As a fresher, I faced a lot of challenges understanding docker concepts like how docker containers work and what they actually are. But as I grew and practiced Docker and its concepts I understood their actual meaning and how they form and how they actually are managed. Through this above video, I have tried my level best to give it a try to make you guys understand what docker container actually means and some basic docker command to shoot. Please avoid the audio quality as I made the entire video with minimum equipment.
Docker is an exciting technology when the developers are focusing on the design of their applications in a cloud-native approach. One of the key characteristics of designing a cloud-native application is to containerize the application. Designing applications such way will save you from hearing some of the words from other developers during development time.
"The application is not working in my local machine!"
"I'm facing version conflicts."
"Libraries are missing."
Every time we onboard new developers in our team we have to fix several issues to build and run the applications successfully in a new machine that leads the onboarding period a bit longer and forces another expert to engage when he/she is focusing on something deliverables.
Last year, we provided a list of Kubernetes tools that proved so popular we have decided to curate another list of some useful additions for working with the platform—among which are many tools that we personally use here at Caylent. Check out the original tools list here in case you missed it.
According to a recent survey done by Stackrox, the dominance Kubernetes enjoys in the market continues to be reinforced, with 86% of respondents using it for container orchestration.
Containerization has come a long way and containers have completely revolutionized the way companies build, test, package and deliver software today. Containers are good for packaging any software — big or small. Microservices are great candidates to be packaged and delivered with container images. With Microservices architecture, the large monolith is decoupled into several mini services that work independently.
This non-interdependency creates freedom among developers to work on services with more proficiency and without worrying about dependencies and how one service might affect the others throughout the whole system. Although microservices are decoupled pieces/services, they all work on one bigger and common objective.
A guide to Kubernetes, containerization, and virtualization.
Kubernetes is a platform for orchestrating containers and services, launched by Google in 2014. The key feature is that it naturally handles containers for you, monitors their availability and uses currently available computing capacity.
The Principle of Containerization
Containers are favored by developers around the world, mainly by addressing the shortcomings of classic virtualization.
DevOps is all the rage in the IT industry. From Wikipedia, DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and information-technology operations (Ops), which aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. The primary reason for the popularity of DevOps is that it allows enterprises to develop and improve products at a quicker pace than traditional software development methods.
As our ever-changing work environment is becoming more fast-paced, the demand for faster delivery and fixes in the software development market is on the rise. Thus, the need for the production of high-quality output in a short period with limited post-production errors gave birth to DevOps.
In the United States, the end of the month of November is when time is taken to perform a retrospective-like event called Thanksgiving. What started out as a dedication to give thanks for the blessing of harvest and the preceding year has transformed into a time to simply be thankful for one's blessings.
Since Thanksgiving is recognized on the fourth Thursday in the month of November, I thought I would introduce a five-part technical twist with the following Thanksgiving-focused articles:
It was the early 2000’s, your .NET application was the best thing to hit the streets since the IBOOK G3 came out. Let’s just say that your application was so money, it didn’t even know it. It had its shiny new (insert any sweet .NET functionality here) and all of the Java-based applications were jealous of it. Those were the days…
Now turn to today. You feel like John Ritter and your application is the problem child from hell. It’s stuck in the past; it won’t allow you to update it. You’re constantly supporting all of its bad consumption habits and it won’t play nice with your other applications.
There are a lot of benefits to be gained from containerization if you haven’t already made the progression yet. Development teams can move at a much faster pace with containers running microservices. The transition from on-premise development servers to cloud environments is more seamless thanks to platforms like Kubernetes. As well as K8s, we also have robust cloud computing solutions like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services natively supporting containers.
Moving from virtual machines to containers is a logical step in today’s modern software development world—especially given the fact that recent trends are geared towards application architecture being microservice-oriented. If you want to modernize your apps and take them to the next level, making the switch to a container-based environment is the first thing to do. There are multiple approaches to choose from and different ways to move from VMs to containers; we are going to discuss them in this article.
Containerization is the new buzz word for developing and deploying apps since they are an efficient way to accelerate development. Container usage has grown exponentially in the last years.
However, managing containers across the infrastructure can become such a complex task that a container management platform is an essential vehicle for any organization. Kubernetes and OpenShift are two of the most popular container management platforms in the market. What makes it interesting is that OpenShift is based on Kubernetes. Read on to learn more about their features and differences.
At Google Cloud Next in San Francisco today, Google announced the beta version of Cloud Run, a new product designed to blend serverless with containerized application development. Built from Knative, Google's open source Kubernetes-based serverless platform, Cloud Run can be used to fully manage containers — or they can be turned over to an existing Google Kubernetes Cluster engine via Cloud Run on GKE, also introduced today.
Docker is both, a brand and a technology. It was developed under the Open Container Initiative by Docker (the company, formerly known as dotCloud) when it virtually went bankrupt. Docker (the product) not only helped it raise funds, but also paved a way for its strong revival into the game. On a Linux platform, it allows an end user to run multiple containers out of which each container can hold a single application. In precise technical terms, when you run an application on an operating system, it runs on its "user space," and every OS comes with a single instance of this user space. In Docker, every container has one separate user space to offer. What this means is that containers enable us to have multiple instances of user spaces on a single operating system. Therefore, in the simplest terms, a container is just an isolated version of a user space. That’s it!
How Is It Different From VMs?
Docker is different from a VM in the following ways:
Modern-day enterprises are largely dependent on software applications to facilitate numerous business requirements. In most enterprises, a software application offers hundreds of functionalities — all piled into one single monolithic application. For instance, ERP and CRM platforms have monolithic architecture and serve hundreds of functionalities efficiently. But, with multiple dependencies overlapping and creating a cluster, the tasks of troubleshooting, scaling, and upgrading them become a nightmare. At times, enterprises try tweaking such monolith applications for their convenience to the point that they cease to serve any real purpose. This is when enterprises start to look for ways of modernizing applications and adopting an architecture that offers flexibility.
The Rise of Microservices
There is a growing demand for microservices architectures amongst enterprises to make the transition to modern delivery. In this architecture, functionalities are designed as independent microservices that are loosely coupled to create one application that can multitask. This method facilitates building applications at scale, where making changes at the component level becomes easy without disturbing other parts of the application.
