The Future of Kubernetes

It has been a record year for Kubernetes (K8s) adoption, and the upward trend appears set to continue into 2023. In a 2021 study released in February this year, 96% of organizations reported either using K8s or having plans to do so in the coming year, marking a steady climb from 78% in 2019 and 83% in 2020. 

Kubernetes and Modern Enterprise IT 

Scalable, cloud-native applications have become the hallmark of modern enterprise IT, largely enabled by K8s container orchestration. With increased development speed and agility, containerization opens the door to a host of IT advances in fields such as:

• Predictive analytics
• Automation
• Machine learning-enabled decision-making
• Interpreting data exhaust
• Connecting front-end users seamlessly with edge sites

As K8s use continues to spread – creating poolable resources across distributed container clusters – production-ready container security has emerged as the primary concern among K8s developers. 

Events at last year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in October confirmed expectations for both continued growth and compounding security challenges for container environments. Event sessions largely focused on use cases, tools, best practices, standards, and audits for container security, highlighting a glaring absence of a single, comprehensive monitoring vantage point. Rather, securing container environments involves a patchwork of disparate tasks across different development phases: 

• Implementing role-based access control (RBAC) or multiple namespaces in the design
• Scheduling regular container vulnerability and misconfiguration scans
• Validating images prior to deployment
• Monitoring K8s API audit logs

As a result, the work required to maintain container security increases disproportionately faster than the scale of container deployment, leaving security and operations teams running – at best – a step or two behind what’s happening at runtime. 

Looking ahead, the big question for security and development teams managing K8s environments is how to achieve effective security while reducing the complexity and number of day-to-day tasks.

Spyderbat: Welcoming the Future of Kubernetes with Runtime Visibility Within and Across Your Containers

The ongoing evolution of K8s-enabled capabilities increasingly challenges the viability of shift-left security practices. As developers continue to push the pace of deployment, they must manage a growing volume of containers across sprawling networks of clouds and microservices. In these environments, the probability of successfully preempting every threat – through scans, validations, and pre-deployment configurations – only diminishes over time. 

Spyderbat’s cloud native security platform fills this emerging gap with an industry-first runtime-focused approach to attack prevention and environment monitoring. Using eBPF technology to capture and connect container and system activities with network connections where existing monitoring tools such as auditD cannot, Spyderbat creates live visibility within and across containers and cloud environments.

In Spyderbat’s easily navigated visual interface, platform teams trace flagged or otherwise suspicious activities to their root causes in seconds, definitively dismissing harmless anomalies and shutting down real operation or security concerns.