Go farther with Fargate: secure your containers with Lacework
By: Bridget Hildebrand, Sr. Product Marketing Manager - Partners & Tech Alliances
Containers and the security required to protect them have become among the most important aspects of modern software development. With the launch of Docker and Kubernetes, and the subsequent popularity of these development platforms, containers are changing how enterprises build, deliver, and improve the applications they use both internally, as well as operate for customer-facing purposes.
While the benefits of containers are changing how IT teams operate, they also present new security challenges that must be addressed as part of every organization’s application development and delivery processes. Containers may be enabling a faster way of doing business, but container security needs to be integrated into development and deployment processes to ensure speed doesn’t overtake risk as a priority.
AWS Fargate is a container-as–service offering from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that helps developers build their applications without having to worry about the infrastructure. It works with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). It removes the need to manage the servers or clusters of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) so that you only need to worry about the containers, network interfaces between them, and IAM permissions.
Users love AWS Fargate because it removes a lot of the heavy lifting that they endure when developing with containers. No longer is time spent worrying about the underlying implementation. The patching, updating, and scaling will all be handled by AWS Fargate. The amount of time saved, as well as the reduction of the management of the multiple layers and access to these layers, has a lasting impact on your development time. This is beneficial, but it also creates challenges for traditional security techniques. As infrastructure becomes increasingly complex and short-lived, it’s imperative to know as soon as possible about suspicious access to containers, or if there are behaviors present that could indicate an active threat. Although the underlying infrastructure is abstracted, the use of Fargate in and of itself does not eliminate all security concerns. This is where Lacework comes in.
With the Polygraph® Data Platform integration with Fargate we help you go further by enabling you to visualize your applications, providing a clear understanding of communications, launches, and other cloud runtime behaviors. How are we able to do this? Lacework scans hosts and streams select metadata to the Lacework data warehouse to build a baseline of normal behavior. From this, Lacework can provide detailed in-context alerts for your anomalous behavior. Anomaly detection uses machine learning to determine, for example, if a machine sends data to an unknown IP, or if a user logs in from an IP that has not been seen before. Together with Lacework® though, you truly can build better.
Want to know more about how Lacework and Fargate work together to protect your containers? Check out our integration brief: Visibility and security for your AWS Fargate attack surface. We also invite you to learn about our many integrated solutions with AWS at www.lacework.com/aws.
