Microservice security best practices

Microservices provide a lot of flexibility for application development teams. They make scaling your application quicker and easier, and they can enable teams to deploy new features and functionality faster.

But when it comes to security, microservices bring a unique set of challenges.

In this post, we’ll cover best practices for securing microservices, and how to implement these best practices as standards in your organization.. 

Best practice: Improve network security by limiting valid connections to microservices 

One of the most significant differences between microservice security and securing a monolith is how each type of application approaches networking. A monolith will often have very few places where network traffic reaches out to the server. Often it’s one location like a proxy or load balancer.

Network connections will come from one location, synchronously wait for the monolith to complete the work the client requested, and receive the application’s response. This simplifies network security for the monolith.

Microservices, on the other hand, serve a small, specific job and accept connections from lots of other servers. This means that you can’t create a short list of acceptable inbound connection requests – but that doesn’t mean you have to accept every inbound request.

• Maintain a list of acceptable connection origins for each microservice you support. 
•  Narrow down the acceptable list of connection origins to a VLAN. 
• Complete this for each of your microservices and re-evaluate regularly

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Best Practice: Secure and harden containers

Containers are a core component of microservice architecture. They provide lightweight, portable environments for deploying individual services. But this portability also expands the attack surface, making container security essential for protecting microservice applications. Securing containers requires a focus on three areas:

• Container image security
• Container runtime security
• Host security

Container image security

Container images package your application and its dependencies. If compromised, an image can serve as a delivery vehicle for malware across all environments. Ensuring image integrity is critical. 

Container image security best practices

• Use trusted images and scan them for known vulnerabilities
• Sign and verify images
• Restrict access to your image registry to authorized users
• Automate image scanning in your CI/CD pipeline to detect risks early

Container runtime security

Securing the container itself helps to reduce the attack surface and enforce strict access controls. 

Container runtime security best practices

• Disable unused ports and only allow encrypted traffic
• Authenticate all inbound connections using secrets
• Scan libraries running on containers for vulnerabilities 
• Always build a new container image after patching vulnerabilities

Host security

Even secure containers can be compromised if the host is vulnerable. Prevent containers from starting with elevated system privileges to avoid them interfering with other containers – or worse, being compromised.

For example, attackers who are able to exploit a library vulnerability within a container could potentially break out of the container and gain control of the host. 

Host security best practices

• Prevent containers from running with elevated privileges
• Restrict system-level access
• Ensure containers can’t open network connections or write to file systems aside from what is strictly necessary
• Regularly update and harden host operating systems

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Best practice: Implement microservices observability

A key element of microservices security is always knowing the status and availability of every service, so you can ensure microservices are both available and resilient. 

Comprehensive logging, alerting, and monitoring are critical to monitoring availability and detecting incidents across microservices.

As a more proactive approach, modern software teams implement comprehensive observability solutions for their microservices applications. Microservices observability has become table stakes for teams who want to improve visibility and proactively remediate potential issues. 

The ability to proactively monitor and act also plays a central role in threat detection. Observability solutions like Honeycomb can help teams get detailed insights on application behavior, allowing for quicker response or detection to potential threats.

Turn microservices best practices into standards with an internal developer portal

Microservices security best practices are easy to talk about, but when it comes to implementation, getting many different teams with varying levels of ownership on the same page can be difficult.

Adopting an internal developer portal, like OpsLevel, can help teams turn best practices into standards for how software is developed and secured in your organization.

An internal developer portal centralizes activity across your software ecosystem–including important tools that help you secure your microservices.  With an internal developer portal like OpsLevel, your teams have a single hub for everything they need to build and deploy software. With everything consolidated in one place and clear ownership of microservices defined through a software catalog,, teams can stay in sync on everything from documentation to enforcing standards.

An internal developer portal can also support your organizations’ microservices application security in several ways:

Integrate with security scanning tools 

• Incorporate real-time vulnerability data from SAST, DAST, IAST, and SCA tools to surface important alerts for microservices 

Automate security checks for every microservice

• Conduct automated security checks to track ongoing health and status of your services.

Define microservices security best practices for your engineering organization

•  Define best practices for microservices security, like open network connections, that can be verified across microservices to monitor progress on compliance with organizational standards.

Customize dashboards for microservices security visibility

• Build graphs and dashboards for important metrics at the team and organization level to monitor progress and keep teams prioritizing the most important things.

OpsLevel: The Internal Developer Portal for secure microservices development

OpsLevel facilitates continuous improvement across all areas of your software ecosystem, from observability to security. OpsLevel integrates with popular security tools like Snyk, Veracode, and Synopsys to centralize alerts, insights, and metrics directly within your developer portal.

With OpsLevel, you can:

• Centralize security alerts, observability data, and other important information from security tools in a single place.
• Run security checks against services to ensure you are following best practices, 
• Define security best practices using OpsLevel’s Service Maturity Rubric and assess every service’s alignment and compliance with security standards–as part of your organization’s definition of software maturity.

OpsLevel helps engineering teams turn application security best practices into standards. To learn more, set up time with one of our technical experts or watch our demo on OpsLevel for security teams.