KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2021. Will you be in attendance? If so, VMblog invites you to swing by and check out the Aqua Security booth in the sponsor showcase.
Read this exclusive KubeCon pre-show interview between VMblog and Story Tweedie-Yates, Senior Director, Product and Rory McCune, Cloud Native Security Advocate, both at Aqua Security, a pure-play cloud native security company, providing customers the freedom to innovate and accelerate their digital transformations. The Aqua Platform provides prevention, detection, and response automation across the entire application lifecycle to secure the build, secure cloud infrastructure and secure running workloads wherever they are deployed.
VMblog: Before KubeCon kicks off, some of your team will be at KubeSec, correct? Can you explain what that event is?
Story Tweedie-Yates: KubeSec Enterprise vSummit is a full-day event taking place on Day 0 at KubeCon (October 12). The event focuses on the challenges faced by larger organizations with demanding security and compliance requirements when deploying Kubernetes in production. This year we are fully virtual to accommodate those who can’t make it to Los Angeles.
VMblog: Speaking of, who should attend KubeSec?
Tweedie-Yates: Whether you are just now beginning to roll out your first production implementation of Kubernetes, or you are an early adopter looking to learn from the experience of your peers, there will be plenty of valuable insights and educational content for all levels.
VMblog: And what can we expect at KubeSec?
Tweedie-Yates: We are thrilled to announce several industry experts taking the stage this year. We have thought leaders from ESG, PNC Bank, AWS, Accenture and Microsoft in the lineup among others. Check out the agenda here: https://kubesec-na-2021.splashthat.com/.
VMblog: As a KubeCon 2021 sponsor, how excited is your company to be back at an in-person trade show event? And is your team prepared for what’s to come? Do you anticipate any challenges?
Tweedie-Yates: We are excited to be back at KubeCon in-person, it’s always been one of our favorite events to connect with the Kubernetes community!
Our booth will be fully staffed with technical experts. Even though masks will prohibit us from seeing smiling faces and there may not be as many in-person attendees as other years, I know those on the show floor will still bring their enthusiasm and excitement to learn and connect.
VMblog: Normally at the KubeCon event, sponsors are showcasing new products or new product updates and features for the first time. Do you have anything new that you’ve either recently announced or plan to discuss in more detail at the event? Can we get a sneak peek?
Tweedie-Yates: We will have some exciting enhancements in terms of indicators of compromise for cloud native environments, detection and response and eBPF. We can’t share much yet but look forward to updating you soon!
VMblog: Attendees always enjoy a good trade show tchotchke. Are you giving away any prizes at your booth or participating in any prize giveaways?
Tweedie-Yates: Attendees can stay hydrated and build immunity with fruit infused Aqua bottled water!
VMblog: What do you attribute to the success and growth of this industry and the KubeCon event itself?
Rory McCune: The cloud native industry has really grown due to both support from the major technology providers, but also huge demand from end-user companies for the kind of agile development and deployment practices that it encourages.
Containerization is a trend that was very much pioneered by developers, so there’s a real grassroots reason for its success. That’s then been paired with a large number of companies moving their workloads to the cloud over the last 5 years to create a really successful movement.
VMblog: What are you most interested in hearing about at this year’s KubeCon event?
McCune: We want to see trends with eBPF, we want to hear about what is being seen in the wild in cloud native environments and we want to hear updates and user stories around Kubernetes.
Along those lines, I am also excited to join Brad Geesaman, Ian Coldwater, and Duffie Cooley to share the details of a new CVE in the Kubernetes ecosystem and how we were able to collaborate and generate a proof-of-concept exploit for Kubernetes, iterate and validate it against multiple types of clusters, and kick off a renewed coordinated disclosure process to help keep users safer. (Check out the session on Wednesday, October 13 from 3:25pm – 4:00pm: Exploiting a Slightly Peculiar Volume Configuration with SIG-Honk.)
VMblog: What are some of the reasons why you believe a KubeCon attendee should add you to their MUST SEE list?
Tweedie-Yates: Shift-left is well-known, but runtime security is less widely adopted. We can show you what effective runtime security for a cloud native environment looks like. We are also passionate about holistic Kubernetes security, which includes container security for the underlying applications as well as the orchestrator itself. We would love to discuss that with you! Lastly, Aqua’s open source projects are a free, fast way to get started with cloud native security. Chatting with us around these projects is the next best thing to the GitHub documentation.
VMblog: How does your company or product fit within the container, cloud, Kubernetes ecosystem?
Tweedie-Yates: Practitioners are not just running containers or using Kubernetes or using functions. They are doing all of these things and more in order to speed up development. Historically, security has been left behind in the shift-left movement, and traditional security products will not be effective in a cloud native environment. The Aqua Platform provides a suite of capabilities, in one solution, to scan for vulnerabilities in images, accomplish admission control for Kubernetes, and protect in runtime for attacks that are in-progress. With Aqua, security doesn’t have to be left behind in the rush to production and faster application development. Aqua secures cloud native environments.
VMblog: Can you give us the high-level rundown of your company’s technology offerings? Explain to readers who you are, what you do, what problems you solve, etc.
Tweedie-Yates: Aqua Security offers the industry’s first and only unified cloud native application protection platform to protect applications from development to production, across VMs, containers, and serverless workloads, up and down the stack. Customers do not need multiple point solutions or multiple screens and consoles.
VMblog: And while talking about your products, can you give readers a few examples of how your offerings are unique? What are your differentiators?
Tweedie-Yates: Many differentiating features were created based on real research into the evolving cloud native threat landscape:
- Dynamic Threat Analysis: protects against supply chain attacks and malware that evades static scanning.
- Vulnerability Shield: Mitigates exploits from vulnerabilities that cannot be fixed or patched without causing downtime in production.
- Drift Prevention: Controls container drift, ensuring container immutability in runtime.
- Open source innovation: Aqua has the most open source projects in the cloud native industry, including Aqua Trivy for vulnerability and misconfiguration scanning; Aqua Tfsec for infrastructure as code scanning; Aqua Tracee for Linux forensics with eBPF; Aqua Starboard for aggregation of data from Kubernetes Security tools; and AppShield Rego library.
VMblog: If an attendee likes what they see and hear at your booth, what message about your product can you send them back with to sell their boss on your technology?
Tweedie-Yates: Shift left is important, but attacks in the cloud native landscape, as shown by our threat research team Nautilus, can evade scanning. Full lifecycle security from the build to infrastructure and then runtime is critical to combating these advanced attacks. Aqua has the most granular runtime capabilities in the market to keep production up and running, and it is a pure play solution built from the ground up so it has less overall management overhead across features.
VMblog: At what stage do you feel we are at with regard to containers? Is there anything still holding it back? Or keeping it from a wider distribution?
McCune: Container adoption is still rising, but there are some areas where companies’ concerns may be slowing down adoption. One of the areas, that’s been noted in surveys like Red Hat’s state of Kubernetes security, is that security concerns are still slowing down deployments. This can have a number of reasons, but one of them is lack of knowledge and confidence from security teams in how to support Cloud Native deployments.
We’d expect this will improve as more companies gain experience in this area and also as the regulatory and security standards world provides more guidance on the controls need to run containerized applications in a secure fashion.
VMblog: There will be plenty of interesting topics covered during the KubeCon keynotes and breakout sessions. But can you take this opportunity to share your own thoughts about any big changes or directions you see for this industry? What trends do you see?
McCune: There’s a couple of trends we can see in the talks this year. The first one is a lot of companies are looking at multi-cluster deployments of Kubernetes and how to manage those. This feels like an inevitable consequence of organizations increasing use of these technologies, as they scale up the problems of managing fleets of clusters become more apparent.
Another theme for this year is Supply chain security. This has gained quite a lot of prominence due to recent attacks and also the executive order on supply chain security issued by the U.S. government. At Kubecon we can see quite a few talks focusing on how supply chain security requirements can be addressed in cloud native environments, and this is something we’d expect to see more of, as the space matures.
VMblog: Do you have any tips for first time attendees that you’d like to share?
Tweedie-Yates: Stay hydrated! Which we can help with. 🙂 Also, wear comfortable shoes and stop by the Aqua booth!
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