As Kubernetes celebrates its 10th anniversary, it’s an opportune moment to reflect on the profound impact Kubernetes has had on the cloud technology landscape. Since its inception, Kubernetes has revolutionized the way we deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications, becoming the de facto orchestration platform for today’s cloud-native ecosystem. This milestone not only highlights Kubernetes’ success as an open-source project but also the vibrant community that has grown around it, driving continuous innovation and collaboration.
In parallel, Sysdig’s journey has been deeply intertwined with Kubernetes’ evolution. From its early days as a pioneering observability solution for containerized workloads, Sysdig has continually evolved to address the growing security needs of the cloud-native world. As we celebrate Kubernetes’ achievements, we also recognize Sysdig’s contributions, particularly through open-source projects like Falco, which enhance the security and resilience of Kubernetes environments. Join me as we walk down memory lane and take a look at Sysdig’s evolution and its significant contributions to the ecosystem over the past decade.
Early Beginnings: Open Source Visibility
Sysdig was founded in 2013 by Loris Degioanni, leveraging his experience as a co-creator of Wireshark, a widely-used network protocol analyzer. Initially, Sysdig focused on providing deep visibility into containerized environments. The creation of open source Sysdig Inspect was a significant milestone in providing visibility into containers and Kubernetes environments. Sysdig Inspect utilized the same deep packet inspection principles from Wireshark, extending them to modern cloud-native applications.
Addressing Security Needs: Introduction of Falco
As Kubernetes rapidly gained traction following its launch in 2014, the need for comprehensive security solutions for containerized workloads became increasingly evident. Recognizing this demand, Sysdig introduced Falco in 2016, an open source project focused on runtime security and threat detection for Kubernetes, containers, and cloud environments. This was a crucial time when Kubernetes was solidifying its position as the outright standard for container orchestration, and tools like Falco played a significant role in enhancing its security posture.
Falco quickly became an essential component of the security toolkit, capable of detecting unexpected behaviors and potential threats in real-time by monitoring system calls. Its significance was further underscored in 2018 when Falco was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the same organization that had been nurturing Kubernetes since its early days. This move not only highlighted Falco’s importance but also ensured its continued development within this blooming cloud-native ecosystem.
In 2020, the CNCF and The Linux Foundation introduced the Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) certification, aimed at professionals who had already obtained the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certification and wanted to showcase their expertise in Kubernetes security. Falco was a core component of the CKS certification spec, further highlighting Falco’s integral role in securing Kubernetes environments.
By 2024, as Kubernetes celebrated a decade of revolutionizing application deployment and management, Falco graduated from the CNCF. This milestone marked it as a mature and stable project, ready for widespread adoption in production environments, paralleling Kubernetes’ own journey to maturity and broad acceptance in the industry.
Expanding the Open Source Ecosystem
Following Falco’s success, the community continued to innovate by developing complementary tools to enhance the overall security posture of cloud-native environments:
- falcosidekick: A companion project that extends Falco’s alerting capabilities by providing a flexible mechanism to forward Falco alerts to various outputs such as Slack, email, or SIEM systems, improving incident response and introspection.
- falcoctl: A tool designed to simplify the deployment, management, and operation of Falco. It helps streamline security workflows and integrates seamlessly with existing CI/CD pipelines.
- Promcat: On our journey to provide a scalable Prometheus experience, we found that companies need a reliable toolbox of observability integrations to succeed. In addition to scale and security controls, they need a quick answer to the following question: “How can I monitor X, Y and Z in my cluster?”
- Falco Talon: Introduced as a dedicated threat mitigation engine for Kubernetes, Falco Talon enables automated responses to detected threats. It uses Kubernetes primitives to take actions like labeling workloads, terminating suspicious pods, and enforcing network policies, thus mitigating threats in real-time.
The Market Evolution: From Disparate Toolsets to CNAPP
The cloud-native security ecosystem has evolved significantly over the past decade. Initially, organizations relied on various separate tools to secure their cloud environments, each addressing specific needs such as protecting workloads, managing permissions, and ensuring compliance. However, the complexity and fragmented nature of these tools led to a growing demand for a more integrated approach to security.
This shift has given rise to the concept of the Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), which aims to provide comprehensive security by combining the capabilities of these individual tools into a unified platform. Sysdig has been at the forefront of this evolution, continually enhancing its open-source offerings to deliver end-to-end security solutions that cover the entire lifecycle of cloud-native applications. By integrating workload protection, permission management, and posture management into a single platform, Sysdig simplifies security operations, improves visibility, and enhances the overall security posture of Kubernetes.
Conclusion
Sysdig’s journey over the past 10 years mirrors the rapid evolution of the cloud-native ecosystem. Sysdig has consistently driven innovation to meet the growing demands of modern, containerized environments. As we celebrate Kubernetes’ 10th anniversary, it’s clear that Sysdig’s contributions have been instrumental in shaping the future of cloud-native security, ensuring that organizations can confidently adopt and secure their cloud-native applications.
If you want to see how far Kubernetes has come over the past 10 years, James Spurin from DiveInto shared an interactive, hands-on, in-browser version of the very first version of Kubernetes (v1.0.0). The lab is accessible through his Github repository and you can run it absolutely for FREE! Kubernetes has come a long way since the first ever official release of the project, and this is a cool way to celebrate the evolution of the project.