WeAreDevelopers Logo WeAreDevelopers
Sign in
For You LIVE
WeAreDevelopers LIVE • Feb 24, 2022

Security Challenges of Breaking A Monolith

Reinhard Kugler

Decomposing your monolith expands your external attack surface, yet strictly limits a vulnerability's blast radius. Discover how to map trust boundaries and confidently secure modern distributed architectures.

Pause
Mute Enter Fullscreen
#1 about 8 min

Building a monolithic video streaming and sharing application

How hardware scaling limitations drive the shift from a monolithic application to distributed services.

#2 about 2 min

Breaking the monolith into isolated microservices and components

Extracting specific functions into microservices solves resource idling and performance bottlenecks.

#3 about 2 min

Addressing base image vulnerabilities in application containers

Containerizing microservices introduces supply chain risks through vulnerable dependencies in base images.

#4 about 3 min

Mapping trust boundaries across frontend and backend services

Separating frontend systems from backend message brokers reduces the attack surface for bad actors.

#5 about 7 min

Managing authentication and authorization for cloud storage buckets

Configuring explicit bucket policies ensures only authorized identities can interact with sensitive cloud storage.

#6 about 3 min

Generating temporary access tokens with pre-signed URLs

Pre-signed URLs enable temporary anonymous access but introduce risks if private signing keys leak.

#7 about 2 min

Distributing and securing keys across cloud container workloads

Distributing long-lived access keys across Kubernetes containers increases the risk of endpoint compromise.

#8 about 3 min

Validating untrusted storage uploads with serverless cloud functions

Invoking a serverless function upon file upload provides scalable input validation for untrusted assets.

#9 about 2 min

Exploiting media transcoders via processing vulnerabilities in containers

Parsing untrusted media uploads in a transcoding container risks arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities.

#10 about 3 min

Escalating privileges from local container exploits to infrastructure

Compromising a single container provides access to environmental secrets and internal infrastructure.

#11 about 1 min

Mitigating container escalation paths using system call filters

Applying seccomp profiles improves container integrity by restricting unauthorized system interactions.

#12 about 3 min

Evaluating the security posture of microservices versus monolithic systems

Microservices effectively contain security breaches by complicating privilege escalation across isolated network boundaries.

#13 about 12 min

Addressing audience questions on security and microservice architectures

Technical discussion covers artificial intelligence in log analysis and the organizational tradeoffs of architectural decisions.

Matching moments

3:18 min

Transitioning from a monolith to a microservice architecture

Aleksandr Kalikov · LIVE

2:14 min

Evaluating data storage limitations and monolithic architectural challenges

George Asafev · World Congress 2023

3:32 min

Transitioning from monolith architectures to microservices and Kubernetes

Liviu Costea · LIVE

3:07 min

Transitioning architecture to microservices at Netflix

Steve Upton Steve Upton · World Congress 2022

3:38 min

Shifting from monolithic architectures to microservices and containers

Markus Kett Markus Kett · World Congress 2022

1:39 min

Introduction to Kubernetes security challenges and opportunities

Marc Nimmerrichter · World Congress 2022

More from WeAreDevelopers LIVE

Fake or News - AI Music Detectors, Translating Ancient Languages & Tiny Heads in Teslas - Eddie Jaoude thumbnail
6:16
7 days ago

Fake or News - AI Music Detectors, Translating Ancient Languages & Tiny Heads in Teslas - Eddie Jaoude

Chris Heilmann, Daniel Cranney

Fake or News: AI Agents Hire Each Other, Spider-Man Ads in Cars & RAM Thieves - Marc Plogas thumbnail
5:46
12 days ago

Fake or News: AI Agents Hire Each Other, Spider-Man Ads in Cars & RAM Thieves - Marc Plogas

Chris Heilmann, Daniel Cranney, Marc Plogas

WeAreDevelopers - Of Agents and Robots thumbnail
1:04:42
12 days ago

WeAreDevelopers - Of Agents and Robots

Chris Heilmann, Daniel Cranney, Marc Plogas

WeAreDevelopers LIVE - How DevRel Makes Tech More Human thumbnail
48:06
19 days ago

WeAreDevelopers LIVE - How DevRel Makes Tech More Human

Chris Heilmann, Daniel Cranney

Fake or News: Smart Glasses in Court, Medical Advice Watches & Mushroom Electonics - Jason Torres thumbnail
7:41
20 days ago

Fake or News: Smart Glasses in Court, Medical Advice Watches & Mushroom Electonics - Jason Torres

Chris Heilmann, Daniel Cranney

Aliens in Quarantine, Python Deprecates Loops, and AI Buys Old Books - Zbyszek Tenerowicz thumbnail
5:43
about 1 month ago

Aliens in Quarantine, Python Deprecates Loops, and AI Buys Old Books - Zbyszek Tenerowicz

Chris Heilmann, Daniel Cranney

Upcoming sessions on this topic

Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

September 24, 2026 · 11:40–12:10

Stage 3

Stop Running Mystery Meat in Production

Jeroen van Erp

Technical Advocate @ SUSE

Jeroen van Erp
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

September 25, 2026 · 15:30–16:00

Mainstage

One Boundary for the Agentic Era

Mark Lechner

Chief Information Security Officer of Docker

Mark Lechner
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

September 23, 2026 · 15:45–17:45

Stage 10

Securing the Agentic Stack: Docker Hardened Images and Supply Chain Security

Ajeet Raina

Developer Advocate at Docker

Ajeet Raina
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

September 25, 2026 · 09:40–10:10

Stage 4

How Docker caught a supply chain attack in 83 minutes

Khushboo Verma

Systems Engineer at Cloudflare

Khushboo Verma
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

September 24, 2026 · 16:50–17:20

Stage 2

It passed auth, then production caught fire

Alex Olivier

Co-founder & CPO @ Cerbos | OpenID AuthZEN Co-chair

Alex Olivier
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

September 25, 2026 · 10:20–10:50

Stage 4

rm -rf: Horror Stories From Unsandboxed AI Agents (and How Docker Fixes This)

Rishab Kumar

Staff Developer Evangelist @ Twilio

Rishab Kumar

Related videos

Microservices? Monoliths? An Annoying Discussion! thumbnail
25:05
World Congress 2024 • about 2 years ago

Microservices? Monoliths? An Annoying Discussion!

Eberhard Wolff

Microservices: how to get started with Spring Boot and Kubernetes thumbnail
1:02:46
LIVE • about 5 years ago

Microservices: how to get started with Spring Boot and Kubernetes

Aleksandr Kalikov

Reliable scalability: How Amazon.com scales on AWS thumbnail
22:24
World Congress 2024 • about 2 years ago

Reliable scalability: How Amazon.com scales on AWS

Florian Mair

Microservice-Ready Without Microservices: Introducing Hexagonal Architecture in a Monolith thumbnail
37:24
Europe 2026 Virtual • 2 months ago

Microservice-Ready Without Microservices: Introducing Hexagonal Architecture in a Monolith

Matthias Kauzmann

How to Destroy a Monolith? thumbnail
26:45
World Congress 2025 • about 1 year ago

How to Destroy a Monolith?

Babette Wagner

You can’t hack what you can’t see thumbnail
29:34
LIVE • almost 6 years ago

You can’t hack what you can’t see

Reto Kaeser

Related articles

From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.