Book Image

Containers in OpenStack

Book Image

Containers in OpenStack

Overview of this book

Containers are one of the most talked about technologies of recent times. They have become increasingly popular as they are changing the way we develop, deploy, and run software applications. OpenStack gets tremendous traction as it is used by many organizations across the globe and as containers gain in popularity and become complex, it’s necessary for OpenStack to provide various infrastructure resources for containers, such as compute, network, and storage. Containers in OpenStack answers the question, how can OpenStack keep ahead of the increasing challenges of container technology? You will start by getting familiar with container and OpenStack basics, so that you understand how the container ecosystem and OpenStack work together. To understand networking, managing application services and deployment tools, the book has dedicated chapters for different OpenStack projects: Magnum, Zun, Kuryr, Murano, and Kolla. Towards the end, you will be introduced to some best practices to secure your containers and COE on OpenStack, with an overview of using each OpenStack projects for different use cases.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Best practices for securing and deploying containers


Containers are replacing virtual machines for running most of the enterprise software due to their modularity and portability between servers. However, there are some risks associated with containers. One obvious risk is related to distributing containers by cloning them as images. If there is any unpatched vulnerability in a base image, all clones and applications inheriting from the base image will suffer too.

The second and major risk is the default user of the container systems, that is, the root user. If an attacker gains access to a root user, which allows an escape from the container, he can get access to not only inside the other containers, but also to the root privileges in the host operating system. And it can be devastating!

Here are some best practices for securing and deploying containers:

  • Users should always use a lightweight Linux operating system. A lightweight operating system, reduces the chances of attack. It also makes...