Securing and hardening environments

An API server can only be as secure as the foundation upon which it is built. To ensure a strong foundation, several basic best practices should be observed to eliminate the most obvious weaknesses. This section provides summaries of the most important of these best practices for both container images and operating systems. The Further reading section provides more detailed references.

Container images

Modern cloud-native development practices have been fueled by the adoption of container technologies as the standard means of application distribution. A container allows an application to be packaged together with all its runtime dependencies and a configured minimalist operating system. This portable package can then be distributed to various runtime environments without concern about dependencies or configuration.

While the adoption of containers has greatly reduced friction between development and operations teams, it has created new vectors...