New computing environments call for new security measures, and data’s expansion into serverless, distributed clouds creates an ever-changing and vulnerable surface of attack. As Kubernetes becomes a de facto platform for orchestrating containerized software applications, securing Kubernetes at scale has become a necessity in cloud computing.

“What you may be looking at today is a small Kubernetes cluster with a couple of nodes and a couple dozen pods; then all sudden, tomorrow, based on load, you could be looking at hundreds of nodes and thousands of pods — a massively increased attack surface,” said Jeff Moncrief (pictured, right), consulting systems engineer, Stealthwatch Cloud, at Cisco Systems Inc.

Working in partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc, Cisco’s Stealthwatch Cloud deploys automatically in the AWS Kubernetes environment, providing service that automatically expands and shrinks as clusters do.

“We will give you complete visibility into everything that’s moving. [It] doesn’t matter where Kubernetes lives; we’ve got you covered,” Moncrief stated.

Stealthwatch client Ernst Haagsman (pictured, left), product marketing manager at JetBrains s.r.o., joined Moncrief for a discussion with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Lauren Cooney (@lcooney), during the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas. Topics covered included changes in the security landscape for AWS customers and how Cisco Stealthwatch provides comprehensive visibility over AWS workload security. (* Disclosure below.)

SaaS-y security

The paradigm is shifting as more organizations move toward a developer operations framework with continuous integration and delivery, according to Moncrief. “As we move into more cloud-native and serverless capabilities, you’re looking at things that don’t necessarily involve operating systems and IP addresses and traditional endpoints,” he said. “And so from a security perspective, we’ve got to go there also.”

Stealthwatch customer JetBrains provides multi-environment tools for developers, and many of its products and tools are hosted on the AWS cloud. “Stealthwatch impacts us [because] we have to make sure that whenever these Lambdas fire, we know what’s going on and we can see what’s happening,” said Haagsman, explaining how Stealthwatch provides the security to ensure that JetBrains follows best practices as it empowers developers to experiment and innovate through their tools.

Stealthwatch is offered as a software as a service security solution. “People [are] having a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that it’s straight API calls,” said Moncrief, explaining how Stealthwatch gathers information from AWS security services, such as CloudTrail, Identity and Aaccess Management (IAM),  and CloudWatch virtual private cloud flow logs.

“We’re bringing it all in, all automated over the API, AWS to AWS where we live,” he said.

As a SaaS offering, Stealthwatch is available on the AWS marketplace with subscription billing and offers services for both public and private network monitoring. No deployment is required, and integration is fast, Moncrief concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS reInvent. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE