Understanding Kubernetes security challenges

Kubernetes is a very flexible system that manages very low-level resources in a generic way. Kubernetes itself can be deployed on many operating systems and hardware or virtual-machine solutions, on-premises, or in the cloud. Kubernetes runs workloads implemented by runtimes it interacts with through a well-defined runtime interface, but without understanding how they are implemented. Kubernetes manipulates critical resources such as networking, DNS, and resource allocation on behalf of or in service of applications it knows nothing about. This means that Kubernetes is faced with the difficult task of providing good security mechanisms and capabilities in a way that application developers and cluster administrators can utilize, while protecting itself, the developers, and the administrators from common mistakes.

In this section, we will discuss security challenges in several layers or components of a Kubernetes cluster: nodes, network, images...