How Microservices Transformed Enterprise Security

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The microservices revolution has swept the IT world in recent years, with 71% of enterprises saying they will adopt the architecture by 2021. When we talk about microservices, we often mean their benefits in terms of agility and flexibility in delivering innovations to customers. But one angle that isn't talked about as much is that of enterprise security issues.

In the age of monolithic applications, a single security issue can mean hundreds or thousands of hours of work spent rebuilding an application from scratch. In addition to having to fix a security flaw itself, this also meant that DevOps and security teams had to review and rebuild the application to change dependencies, sometimes having to effectively reverse engineer entire applications.

Microservices have changed this paradigm. They allow DevOps to isolate flaws or security issues and fix them without worrying about breaking their entire application stack. This doesn't just mean faster execution of security patches, but more resilient and efficient DevOps teams and IT stacks overall.

How microservices help contain security vulnerabilities

Taking a step back, let's remember what a microservices architecture is: a set of services that can be deployed independently and loosely linked together through intermediaries such as APIs. These individual services typically reflect the most fundamental building blocks of your applications.

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In practice, containers are the technology used to deliver microservices architectures. These lightweight, self-contained packages bundle application code with lightweight operating systems, runtimes, libraries, and configuration data. By using an orchestration system such as Kubernetes, individual containers can exchange their outputs with each other, allowing them to perform the overall task that would once have been done through a monolithic application.

The microservices architecture that is most often provided by containers isolates many security risks by design. Since individual microservices only exchange their outputs through the intermediary orchestrating them, it is very difficult for a breach or compromise of a single microservice to permeate the entire application.

Play with the calendar

But what does the above mean in practice? Here is a thought experiment.

A few years ago, manufacturers discovered that many consumer devices became unusable if their date was changed to 01/01/1970. Imagine if we introduced this flaw in the calendar application used in an enterprise environment. Now imagine a black...