Cloud native machine identities create tipping point for the adoption of Zero Trust security models

Venafi, the inventor and leading provider of machine identity management, today announced that cert-manager, the open source standard for cloud native machine identity management created by Jetstack, a Venafi company, has been downloaded more than 1 million times a day for the last 18 months. This data brings into sharp relief the critical importance of machine identity management to the security of containers in cloud native environments.

“Today, every business — irrespective of industry — develops software, and most of these businesses have accelerated their migration to cloud native development methodologies to speed up software innovation,” said Kevin Bocek, vice president of threat intelligence at Venafi. “This shift has dramatically increased the number of machines on enterprise networks, accelerating the adoption of identity-centric security models, like Zero Trust. There’s a direct correlation between the increasing number of applications and data hosted outside of traditional networks and the increasing volume and sophistication of the security threats targeting cloud native environments.”

“The human-centric and location-based security mechanisms we have relied on previously are no longer fit for this purpose.”

Identity management for machines, which include devices, applications and containers, is much more complex than identity management for humans; this is why existing security frameworks don’t solve the problem. This complexity, combined with the rapid growth in Kubernetes adoption, is creating new identity management challenges for security teams already stretched by the shortage of skilled resources.

“As organizations look to implement Zero Trust principles to secure their fast-growing cloud native environments, an identity-first security model becomes a required capability,” said Matthew Bates, CTO and cofounder of Jetstack, a Venafi company focused on cloud native. “The human-centric and location-based security mechanisms we have relied on previously are no longer fit for this purpose.”

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Jetstack created cert-manager as an open source project to simplify the automation of certificate management within Kubernetes. Built natively on top of the Kubernetes API, cert-manager issues and renews X.509 certificates from popular public and private certificate issuers, including Let’s Encrypt, HashiCorp Vault and the Venafi Trust Protection Platform. Boasting hundreds of contributors and almost 9,000 stars on GitHub, cert-manager was accepted into the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) in 2020. The Jetstack team continues to maintain the project, making over 70% of all code commits.

Continued Bates: “In Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters, unique trusted machine identities are required across the stack to enable secure communications north-to-south and east-to-west and to provide the identity foundations for fine-grained authorization controls. The open source cert-manager project makes it easy and fast for developers to ship software that is secured by default, helping to manage all machine identities. With over 5.6 million Kubernetes developers worldwide, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that cert-manager is downloaded millions of times a day. It is clearly the de facto standard for managing and securing machine identities in cloud native environments. We’re thrilled to maintain and invest in this critical project in the open source ecosystem.”

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