How Google Is Improving Kubernetes Container Security

The open-source Kubernetes container orchestration project has become increasingly important in recent years as organizations rely on it to deploy applications. With the increased reliance has come increased scrutiny on security, especially at Google, which hosts a managed Kubernetes service called Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). In a call with press ahead of the KubeCon conference that runs Dec. 11-13 in Seattle, Maya Kaczorowski, product manager, Security & Privacy, at Google, outlined the steps Google is taking to help secure Kubernetes now and into the future. Kubernetes is an open-source effort originally created and led by Google; since 2015, Kubernetes has been hosted at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure operate their own hosted Kubernetes services, and there are commercial offerings from multiple vendors including IBM, Red Hat, SUSE, Pivotal and Cisco, among others. The GKE service is based on the upstream Kubernetes project and provides Google's view on how Kubernetes should run in the public cloud.