Securing Kubernetes on Cloud

When to Use

• When deploying new managed Kubernetes clusters in production with security requirements
• When hardening existing EKS, AKS, or GKE clusters after a security audit or pentest finding
• When implementing workload identity to eliminate static cloud credentials in pods
• When enforcing pod security policies across namespaces to prevent container escapes
• When integrating runtime security monitoring for detecting container-level threats

Do not use for non-Kubernetes container deployments like ECS Fargate or Azure Container Instances, for application-level security within containers (see securing-serverless-functions), or for CI/CD pipeline security (see implementing-cloud-devsecops).

Prerequisites

• Managed Kubernetes cluster provisioned on EKS, AKS, or GKE with admin access
• kubectl configured with cluster admin credentials
• Familiarity with Kubernetes RBAC, namespaces, and security contexts
• Container network interface plugin supporting network policies (Calico, Cilium)