April 30, 2024

410m-microservices-security-market-validation-and-the-cicd-pipeline

By Dennis · 3 minute read

Continous_Delivery_by_Jez_Humble_and_David_Farley_sketch-cartoon

Much like the industrial revolution witnessed massive production acceleration with the advent of the assembly line, so too has the onset of continuous integration and continuous delivery been bolstered by the arrival of microservices. These services exist at the core of the CICD pipeline and recently the microservices security market has received a massive validation with the acquisition of Twistlock by Palo Alto Networks.

As consumers in the 21st century demand more and more customization for their litany of unique wants and needs, the old school method of software development was bound to give way to a new and better process that enabled reaching that goal. Recently, within the last 5 years or so, the software industry has shifted away from a monolithic culture to one embracing microservices. The microservices industry has been steadily gaining traction and we have witnessed the rise of companies like Docker and Kubernetes that support this new mindset. The new approach has many benefits such as the ability to deploy independently, scale up and maintain each component while simultaneously parallelizing development across numerous teams.

About the Microservices Market

Rapid, lightweight and lean development practices have permeated the industry psyche. In contrast to monolithic software development where massive deployments are followed by countless glitches and errors, microservices are smaller in size and are created for singular use cases. Effectively, they are more sniper targeted applications that are faster to iterate, have less moving parts to incur the wrath of Murphy’s Law, and allow for assembly line like specialization.

In economic terms, the benefits of specialization allotted by microservices is leading to greater efficiency. The comparative advantages developing between services is driving both increased returns of scale as well as economies of scale. With history as a predictor, we are likely to continue witnessing the evolution of these benefits.

Microservices and Containers

Containers are architectural implementations used to develop and manage microservices. They give a user the ability to create, ship, and run any application on any machine by packaging software with everything it needs to run. They are completely isolated from any other software that runs concurrently in the same environment. Furthermore, they let different teams develop different microservices simultaneously. Additionally, containers allow for the ability for both associated and non-associated teams to share in and utilize each others’ productions. Due to their power and flexibility, both containers and microservices have become popular and well regarded tools in DevOps communities.

That said, microservices are not without their challenges. One case in point is security. With so many iterations of code and snippets along with increased sharing, the complexities of security can begin to mount. More moving parts means more chances for failure. The more a containerized application is shared, the more chances it has to become tampered, regardless of intent. In traditional monolithic organizations you would run penetration and security tests, but with the speed of delivery, there’s no time for that in DevOps. To complicate matters further, microservices vastly increases the number of ports used in a project leaving significantly more doors to continuously check and prevent bad actors from entering through. Thus it is the burgeoning industry is in need of good security solutions.

Details of the Deal

It has been a point of dispute whether or not microservices security is in fact a separate solution and its own industry. However, with the recent $410 million acquisition of container security company, Twistlock, by Palo Alto Networks, the market is validated and happening. To boot, the chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, Nikesh Arora, was quoted as saying they will be integrating the new assets “as soon as possible.”

Dror Davidoff, co-founder and CEO of Aqua Security, another container security company, noted that the acquisition demonstrates that customers view container/cloud-native security “as critical to their environments”. He furthered by saying, “The acquisition price is very high for a space that is still only about 4 years old, and a major security player demonstrated with their checkbook that the early movers have a significant advantage (or they would have tried to develop it themselves).”

Future Outlook for Global Cloud Microservices

According to market research firm MRFR, the global cloud microservices market is forecasted to be valued at $2.1 billion in 2023, which is a CAGR of 25.0% up from 2017’s market value of $580 million. Some of the major factors driving the market’s growth include:

Continued microservices architecture proliferation
Increased adoption of cloud services
Rising demand for secure IT operations
Increased enterprise demand for data security through private cloud applications
Drive to reduce costs in on-premise IT deployments

Microservices Asset Integrity and Blockchain Immutability

At present, Codenotary is the only player in the market who is delivering DevOps and microservices asset integrity utilizing blockchain technology. It’s vcn tool adds continuous trust to the DevOps process, containers, and Kubernetes environments and instantly verifies the integrity of code, /images/blog, containers, documents, backups, and more. Codenotary leverages the Zero Trust Consortium’s blockchain and delivers: