Application containerization is a relatively new methodology in the world of IT.This innovation allows developers to deploy increasing numbers of application instances at a relatively low cost compared to purchasing new hardware. It is a rapidly developing technology that is changing the way developers test and run application instances in the cloud. Adoption of application containers is growing every year. The principal benefit of application containerization is that it provides a less resource-intensive alternative to running an application on a virtual machine. This is because application containers can share computational resources and memory without requiring a full operating system to underpin each application.
Specificity of the architecture for application containerization is that it does not require a hypervisor. Containers also do not run their own individual instances of the operating system. A container houses the application code along with all of its dependencies (bins, libraries, etc.). A container orchestration software tool sits between the containers and the host operating system, and each container on the machine accesses a shared host kernel instead of running its own operating system as virtual machines do. Rather than purchasing new servers or investing in processor upgrades, IT organizations could use virtual machines to launch additional instances of an operating system simultaneously on one or more physical machines. This enabled IT organizations to perform more routine tests at scale, or to use the same server for multiple functions and optimize resource allocation.
Application containerization represents a fundamental re-thinking of how software development teams can most efficiently make use of computational resources for software testing or running microservices or distributed applications.
As the use of containerized applications continues to grow, so do the instances where high assurance security is required. Containerized applications incorporate the use of encryption to protect sensitive data and systems and the underlying encryption keys must be secured. The use of hardware security modules (HSMs) to safeguard cryptographic keys is not only a recognized best practice but is often required by compliance mandates.
The use of HSMs can strengthen the security of containerized applications only if:
– developers working with containerized applications are familiar with the complexities if integrating high-assurance hardware security modules (HSMs)
– we have in mind that development and release cycles which are happening very quickly, often with limited time between staging and production.
HSM enchances the security of the containeruzed deployments, provides a well architected containerized deployment model with associates scripts for creating application continer images and supports a variety of Linux platform base templates.
If you wan to learn more about integrating containerized application with an HSM, please contact us at https://alfatec.hr/en/contact/
