Secure Data Services on Container Platforms: Protecting Distributed Query Engines, Messaging Platforms, and Search Systems

Abstract

As organizations rapidly migrate their data services and other workloads to containers, the responsibility for securing them cannot fall into the hands of the application teams alone. Distributed query engines, messaging systems, search engines, and data stores amass huge troves of organizational data and provide rich query interfaces, making them a target for external and insider adversaries alike. The article describes a reference architecture that serves as an implementation guide for securing data services in cloud-native environments. Based on documentation from the most popular open-source projects in the cloud-native ecosystem and guidelines from the National Institute of Standards and Technology‚ the reference architecture consists of recommendations across four security domains: control plane identity and access management‚ data plane cryptography and network segmentation‚ secrets and key lifecycle management‚ and operational auditability․ We present an anonymized enterprise implementation pattern that assembles such controls into a defensible and auditable posture across portfolios of heterogeneous services.