Learning Kubernetes Security. A practical guide for secure and scalable containerized environments - Second Edition

Raul Lapaz

With readily available services, support, and tools, Kubernetes has become a foundation for digital transformation and cloud-native development, but it brings significant security challenges such as breaches and supply chain attacks.This updated edition equips you with defense strategies to protect your applications and infrastructure while understanding the attacker mindset, including tactics like container escapes and exploiting vulnerabilities to compromise clusters. The author distills his 25+ years of experience to guide you through Kubernetes components, architecture, and networking, addressing authentication, authorization, image scanning, resource monitoring, and traffic sniffing. You’ll implement security controls using third-party plugins (krew) and tools like Falco, Tetragon, and Cilium. You’ll also secure core components, such as the kube-apiserver, CoreDNS, and kubelet, while hardening images, managing security contexts, and applying PodSecurityPolicy. Through practical examples, the book teaches advanced techniques like redirecting traffic from misconfigured clusters to rogue pods and enhances your support incident response with effective cluster monitoring and log analysis.By the end of the book, you'll have a solid grasp of container security as well as the skills to defend your clusters against evolving threats.