Book Image

Learn Kubernetes Security

By : Kaizhe Huang, Pranjal Jumde
5 (1)
Book Image

Learn Kubernetes Security

5 (1)
By: Kaizhe Huang, Pranjal Jumde

Overview of this book

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration platform for managing containerized applications. Despite widespread adoption of the technology, DevOps engineers might be unaware of the pitfalls of containerized environments. With this comprehensive book, you'll learn how to use the different security integrations available on the Kubernetes platform to safeguard your deployments in a variety of scenarios. Learn Kubernetes Security starts by taking you through the Kubernetes architecture and the networking model. You'll then learn about the Kubernetes threat model and get to grips with securing clusters. Throughout the book, you'll cover various security aspects such as authentication, authorization, image scanning, and resource monitoring. As you advance, you'll learn about securing cluster components (the kube-apiserver, CoreDNS, and kubelet) and pods (hardening image, security context, and PodSecurityPolicy). With the help of hands-on examples, you'll also learn how to use open source tools such as Anchore, Prometheus, OPA, and Falco to protect your deployments. By the end of this Kubernetes book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of container security and be able to protect your clusters from cyberattacks and mitigate cybersecurity threats.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Kubernetes
7
Section 2: Securing Kubernetes Deployments and Clusters
14
Section 3: Learning from Mistakes and Pitfalls

Communicating between pods

Kubernetes pods are dynamic beings and ephemeral. When a set of pods is created from a deployment or a DaemonSet, each pod gets its own IP address; however, when patching happens or a pod dies and restarts, pods may have a new IP address assigned. This leads to two fundamental communication problems, given a set of pods (frontend) needs to communicate to another set of pods (backend), detailed as follows:

  • Given that the IP addresses may change, what are the valid IP addresses of the target pods?
  • Knowing the valid IP addresses, which pod should we communicate to?

Now, let's jump into the Kubernetes service as it is the solution for these two problems.

The Kubernetes service

The Kubernetes service is an abstraction of a grouping of sets of pods with a definition of how to access the pods. The set of pods targeted by a service is usually determined by a selector based on pod labels. The Kubernetes service also gets an IP address...