Comparative Analysis of Open-Source Kubernetes Runtime Security Tools in Cloud Platforms of AKS and EKS

Raju, Balamuralikrishna (2025) Comparative Analysis of Open-Source Kubernetes Runtime Security Tools in Cloud Platforms of AKS and EKS. Masters thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.

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Abstract

An increasing use of cloud native adoption, significantly raised the adoption of containerised microservices, one such effective container orchestration platform is Kubernetes. Though the cloud managed Kubernetes services like AWS EKS (elastic Kubernetes service) Azure AKS (azure Kubernetes service) made the deployment and scaling in and out of the microservices easier, it has introduced significant runtime security challenges that the cloud providers inadequately addressed. Some of the open-source security tools like Kube armour, tetragon, Tracee, Falco are helpful in detecting the runtime security challenges, but their comparative efficacy and operational impact in multi cloud environments is largely unaddressed. The previous work done by malik and vugt (2023) gives a valuable information but these tests were conducted on a in a controlled hardware testbed environment, this left a critical gap of knowing their performance on different clouds platforms. This research conducts a comparative analysis of these tools by deploying them in EKS and AKS cluster, which hosts a set if microservice application. By applying a simulates cyber-attack and setting up monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana, this study evaluates each tool’s detection accuracy latency resource usage like CPU and memory. These findings will give insights of trade-offs between security, observability and system overhead in major cloud native Kubernetes environments, which guides in required tool selection based on specific cloud context and performance requirement.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Supervisors:	Name Email Gupta, Shaguna UNSPECIFIED
Subjects:	T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Cloud computing Q Science > QA Mathematics > Computer software > Computer Security T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Computer software > Computer Security
Divisions:	School of Computing > Master of Science in Cloud Computing
Depositing User:	Ciara O'Brien
Date Deposited:	01 Sep 2026 10:22
Last Modified:	01 Sep 2026 10:22
URI:	https://norma.ncirl.ie/id/eprint/9729

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