What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is a revolutionary, highly-integratable, open-source system designed to manage containerized workloads and services. It increased portability between clouds and on-premise environments, which was difficult if not impossible before Kubernetes. This allowed for cloud-native architectures, which ramped up deployment cycles and business responsiveness to usability needs and desires.

Kubernetes helps with management and deployment of containers across varied infrastructures, helping automation and infrastructure as code (IaC) keep up with the rate of technological and business growth.

Google designed and introduced the open-sourced software, Kubernetes, in 2014. It is currently managed externally, by the vendor-neutral Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kubernetes continues to play a seminal role in growing an ecosystem of open-source projects and container orchestration. Envoy, Prometheus, Helm, NGINX, and Wallarm are all scions of the CNCF landscape.

Exposing APIs with Kubernetes Ingress Controllers

Exposing APIs allows microservices to talk to APIs through a frontend interface. Kubernetes clusters start as a contained system. To allow them to have access to external data, users, or applications they need to have a way to communicate opened by way of a service, like an Ingress controller. Adding an Ingress controller allows the quick addition or modification of external resources to work with your internal Kubernetes microservices. For example, through an Ingress controller end users can access your company’s catalog. It’s the total communication with any server and an external endpoint.

Adding an Ingress controller allows you to accept internal requests and respond to external API calls. Ingress controllers process inbound requests based on rules—URI path, backing service name, etc.—defined to add external connectivity to the cluster and also provide http load balancing.

Kubernetes supports several Ingress controllers but the most popular two that are supported and maintained through the Kubernetes project are GCE and NGINX controllers. A Wallarm-enabled Ingress controller can be installed with a simple Helm command, adding security to all this newly inbound traffic.

Kubernetes’ Microservices Add Adaptability and New Security Needs

As Kubernetes allows quick integration of new APIs, adding additional API security and L7 protections for distributed applications is a smarter way of protecting against vulnerabilities and attacks. As companies quickly respond to user needs, change and growth add increasingly complex layers of internal and outward-facing APIs. Protecting applications and underlying infrastructure relies on having security solutions that can learn at the pace of innovation and monitor at the API level regardless of the application language.

Comprehensive API Security Made Easy

We have worked hard to make Kubernetes security even easier for your teams.

• Natively deploy API security into your Ingress controller
• DevOps-friendly tools used to protect microservices scale and orchestrate attack mitigation and post analytics services
• No disruption or interruptions to other security solutions or CI/CD
• No additional network hop or special network architecture
• Enable additional protections for east-west APIs

Wallarm module extends existing GCE, NGINX and NGINX Plus Ingress controllers with almost zero-ops. You can simplify deployment and take advantage of all the functionality of the leading packages at the same time.

The NGINX Kubernetes Ingress Controller includes support for load balancing, SSL termination, URI rewrites, and other key application delivery features. Bonus features, such as session persistence and JWT authentication for APIs, are available to NGINX Plus users.

If you already have an NGINX Ingress controller, the Wallarm module can be installed with one Helm command.

Easy Kubernetes Security Deployment

$ helm repo add wallarm https://repo.wallarm.com/charts/stable
$ helm repo update
$ helm install --name=your-release-name wallarm/wallarm-ingress

Wallarm-enabled Ingress Controller

Learn more about the Wallarm-enabled Ingress Controller for Kubernetes, including installation details, in our documentation.

To access a detailed overview of the Wallarm Kubernetes Ingress Controller, visit our Github page.