The microservices philosophy and architectural approach have existed for a while in the form of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). A new set of sophisticated tooling makes this elegant architecture practical to deliver. The number of services, and their ephemeral nature, makes it virtually impossible to secure the environment using the tools and manually-driven processes of the past.

“It really forces you to change the approach that you take for security from human-designed and maintained with a lot of direct manipulation to a much higher degree of automation,” John Morello, CTO of Twistlock, said.

A new breed of security tools can understand and model an application’s typical traffic patterns, develop a reference model that reflects that known good state, and search for anomalies that violate that model. At the same time, new patterns and practices for developers, operations and security teams help integrate that security knowledge from the very beginning of the application development lifecycle.