Preface

The growing complexity and scalability of real-world applications has led to a transition from monolithic architecture to microservices architecture. Kubernetes has become the de facto orchestration platform for deploying microservices. As a developer-friendly platform, Kubernetes enables different configurations to suit different use cases, making it the primary choice among most DevOps engineers. The openness and highly configurable nature of Kubernetes increases its complexity. Increased complexity leads to misconfigurations and security issues, which if exploited, can cause a significant economic impact on an organization. If you are planning to use Kubernetes in your environment, this book is for you.

In this book, you'll learn about how to secure your Kubernetes cluster. We briefly introduce Kubernetes in the first two chapters (we expect you to have a basic understanding of Kubernetes before you begin). We then discuss the default configurations of different Kubernetes components and objects. Default configurations in Kubernetes are often insecure. We discuss different ways to configure your cluster correctly to ensure that it is secure. We dive deep to explore different built-in security mechanisms, such as admission controllers, security contexts, and network policies, that are provided by Kubernetes to help secure your cluster. We also discuss some open source tools that complement the existing toolkits in Kubernetes to improve the security of your cluster. Finally, we look at some real-world examples of attacks and vulnerabilities in Kubernetes clusters and discuss how to harden your cluster to prevent such attacks.

With this book, we hope you will be able to deploy complex applications in your Kubernetes clusters securely. Kubernetes is evolving quickly. With the examples that we provide, we hope you will learn how to reason about the right configurations for your environment.

The Secure DevOps Platform. Scale-up Kubernetes. Scale-down risk.

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