AWS and Cloudanix team co-authored this blog: Real-Time Threat and Anomaly Detection for Workloads on AWS

What is Kubernetes?

This guide covers its core components, benefits in the cloud, real-world use cases, and managed services like AWS EKS and GKE, along with security best practices.

What is Kubernetes?

An orchestration system to automate your SDLC

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system and a powerful tool for automated deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It provides a portable, extensible, and scalable platform that can be used to manage containerized workloads on a variety of infrastructures including the cloud. Features such as declarative configuration, autoscaling, and health checks make it a powerful option for application operations.


Benefits of Using Kubernetes in the Cloud

  • Increased visibility and control: Central dashboard for managing applications and resources.
  • Improved security: Role-based access control (RBAC) enhances access management and security.
  • Open source with active community: Continuous improvements and community-driven support.
  • Portability and flexibility: Works with any major cloud provider or on-prem setup.
  • Self-healing capabilities: Automatically restarts or replaces containers that fail.

Core Components of Kubernetes

Understanding the main building blocks of Kubernetes helps you manage and optimize workloads more efficiently.

Nodes

A node is a physical or virtual machine that runs pods (the smallest deployable units in Kubernetes). Pods can host one or more containers.

Cluster

A cluster is a group of nodes managed by Kubernetes. It ensures workloads run across all nodes reliably and at scale.

Controllers

Controllers manage the state of Kubernetes objects. For instance, the Deployment Controller ensures that the specified number of pods are always running.

Services

Services expose pods to the outside world or other pods inside the cluster. They provide load balancing and DNS resolution for pods.


Best Practices to Secure Your Workloads

AWS Cloud

  • Perform automated audit checks.
  • Monitor IAM permissions and container misconfigurations.

Azure Cloud

  • Use Azure Policy and Defender for Cloud for continuous compliance.

GCP Cloud

  • Protect workloads with tight access policies and workload identity controls.

Why Use Kubernetes?

  • Run applications at scale: Autoscaling based on real-time demand helps optimize cloud costs.
  • Seamless application movement: Easily move workloads between environments (dev, staging, production).
  • Add new functionality: Extend platform capabilities with open-source tools and custom plugins.
  • Flexible deployment environments: Run apps in cloud, on-prem, or hybrid environments as needed.

Secure Your Containers With Cloudanix

Cloudanix provides a central security dashboard across AWS, Azure, GCP, and more. It includes:

  • Container and Kubernetes workload protection
  • IAM permission boundaries
  • Misconfiguration alerts
  • Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) features

Managed Kubernetes Services

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

EKS is AWS’s managed Kubernetes offering. It eliminates the need to install, operate, or maintain Kubernetes control planes or nodes. AWS handles the Kubernetes infrastructure, so you can focus on workloads.

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

GKE is a fully managed Kubernetes service from Google Cloud. It enables easy deployment, scaling, and management of containerized apps, offering seamless integration with other GCP services.


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One day, I changed the password of a root account, and my CTO called me within less than a minute to confirm if I did so. I was not expecting a reaction this quick. He told me Cloudanix alerted him of this password change and that he wanted to confirm as it was a critical security notification. I couldn't believe it!

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Compliance is one way of staying secure, but what I want is the ability to go deeper and attain 'true security.' Cloudanix provides us the capability to do so.

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SRE Lead, HugoHub

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Co-founder & CTO, Airgap Networks

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Head of Technical Engineering, Finfinity

The snooze feature and responsible alerts have helped us save time and prioritize what to tackle first.

Satish Mohan
Satish Mohan
Co-founder & CTO, Airgap Networks

Implementing Cloudanix JIT internally allowed us to practice what we preach. By eliminating permanent access to our own clouds and databases, we've neutralized the risk of standing privileges, ensuring our own 'keys to the kingdom' are never left exposed.

Girish Manghnani
Girish Manghnani
Managing Partner, Tech Inspira

The problem with permissions is a lot of times, the gaps are left open due to oversights from inside the organization itself. With Cloudanix's CIEM, we get a complete view of user permissions and access. This enables us to update the permissions, reducing the attack surface.

Nilesh Pethani
Nilesh Pethani
Application Architect, iMocha

In the world of Fintech, trust is our currency. Cloudanix provided the frictionless visibility we needed to secure our EKS workloads across AWS, ensuring we stay audit-ready for SOC2 and GDPR without slowing down our engineering velocity.

Amol Naik
Amol Naik
Head of Security & Infrastructure, HugoHub

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Senior DevSecOps, Meesho

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Senior Director Global Solutions Engineering, Eversana

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Satish Mohan
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CTO, Airgap Networks

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President Engineering and Product, Kapittx

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Managing Partner, Tech Inspira

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CTO, HugoHub

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Staff Security Engineer, Meesho

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Larry Wheat
Larry Wheat
Staff Solutions Engineer, Eversana

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