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What Are Microservices?
Microservices are a developmental approach to creating applications. Since they are an application framework, microservices are loosely coupled and evenly distributed. So one teammate’s change won’t destroy the entire app. One benefit of using microservices is that apps can be built to meet your business changing needs.
Microservices solves challenges by staying as modular as possible. They are used to build an application as a group of small services. All of the services are independently deployable and run their own process.
Developers can use different programming languages to write microservices. While this creates systems that are flexible and scalable, it still needs a dynamic makeover. Also, APIs are included with Microservices, meaning that they can leverage the same solutions and tools that are in the web service ecosystem and RESTful.
Testing the APIs can help you validate the information and data flow throughout the microservice development. And in this guide, we’ll tell you some principles of microservices security to ensure that your app runs smoothly.
Automatic Security Updates
If you want a secure and stable microservice architecture, you’ll need to find out how to automate or keep the software updates under control. This is when high testing coverage is necessary.
Every time a part of your system is updated, you need to catch any issue early and with as much detail as possible, So if the operation fails, then you can automatically reverse the mistakes within the app’s code.
Strengthen Your Host Operating System
You need to improve the security of your app’s operating system. First, you should use a container-specific host operating system. They don’t have unnecessary functionality, resulting in a smaller attack surface than traditional hosts. We suggest that use a platform that controls traffic using a firewall or a router.
You need to create a baseline to help harden your system. You should do the following:
- Set access roles
- Log in the audit data
- Create a user authentication system
- Specify permissions for user access
To prevent data theft, you should limit the container access to the operating system resources. As a rule of thumb, use kernel mode to run container engines and run the containers in user mode. In fact, Linux has multiple security layers that can limit the container’s capabilities. You can achieve security in Linux using kernel security modules like SELinux, Secomp, and Linux capabilities.
Utilize Orchestration Managers
There are two ways to achieve a successful microservice orchestration
- Coding orchestration as separate microservices
- Using API gateways as the orchestration layer
With orchestration managers, you can automate your microservices and improve your security. For example, orchestrators help you segregate workloads, manage multiple containers, collect logs, and limit metadata access.
Some orchestration managers have additional management tools that help developers share and store confidential data such as passwords, SSL certificates, identity tokens, and encryption keys. So consider using orchestration managers to ensure that your microservices architecture is successful.
Conclusion
Microservices helps developers improve their infrastructure and applications. However, they require a different approach to security. A security program for your microservices software needs to address your application’s lifecycle.
Using the advice in this guide, you can have a secure deployment and development microservices and containers.
