In this episode of The New Stack Analysts, we look at how Nuage Networks is addressing container security through the use of Software Defined Networking (SDN).
To prepare our latest eBook: Networking, Security, and Storage with Docker and Containers, The New Stack founder Alex Williams and TNS eBook editor Benjamin Ballspoke withNuage Networks Product Management and Marketing Leader Hari Krishnan and Nuage Networks Director of Product Line Management Harmeet Sahni.
When the rise of containers, there has been a significant increase in discussions surrounding to how to best manage one’s container-based infrastructure securely. Sahni explained that there is no “standard,” for orchestration platforms or containers just yet, with Nuage Networks taking an agnostic approach to how its customers use its platform. “We support the choices our customers make. We’re not saying X is better than Y,” Sahni said.
The interview can also be enjoyed on YouTube.
Container-based environments allow for developers to deploy cloud-native applications, with the ability to scale out rapidly. However, without the proper tooling, the supporting infrastructure can quickly become a pain point. “That’s where SDN comes in. People are talking about infrastructure as code, and SDN done the right way is really that. You treat your network as code. As you deploy these dynamic applications, your SDN follows that. You can change things very quickly, because it’s already programmable. No longer is the application team held back by what the networking team can do with legacy approaches,” Sahni explained.
Having initially come to fruition as a platform for creating cloud networks on virtual machines, Nuage Networks has evolved to add support for bare metal setups, then containers. “Some of the early approaches ended up creating silos for containers. We said, ‘You know, that’s going to become problematic when you go to deploy applications,’” Sahni mentioned. From an operations perspective, Nuage Networks hopes to counter problems before they start, offering robust logging, auditing, and policy management as a part of its platform. Containers, Krishnan explained, innately share more information than VMs, which impacts how policy management is handled, “They need to be treated a bit differently,” Krishnan said.
Sponsor Note
Nuage Networks brings a unique combination of groundbreaking technologies and unmatched networking expertise to the enterprise and telecommunications industries. Nuage Networks delivers massively scalable and highly programmable SDN solutions within and across the data center and out to the WAN with the security and availability required by business-critical environments.
Container security will undoubtedly continue to be a staple of many discussions to come, but it is the hope of Nuage Networks that embracing SDN will help developers better create and manage policies when working with containers. “The challenge still is how do you make sure that developers are putting in the right policies? The sort of the give-and-take we’re going through is do we give full control to the developers and let them kind of drive things completely? Versus where your Ops team creates from predefined policies and then application developers have to pick from those templates when they’re deploying their app.”
Nuage Networks is a sponsor of The New Stack.
Feature image via Pixabay.
This post is part of a larger story we’re telling about the state of the container ecosystem
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