The New Stack Makers

Web Application Firewalls (WAF) first emerged in the late 1990s as Web server attacks became more common. Today, in the context of cloud native technologies, there’s an ongoing rethinking of how a WAF should be applied. No longer is it solely static applications sitting behind a WAF, said Tigera CEO Ratan Tipirneni, President & CEO of Tigera in this episode of The New Stack Makers. “With cloud native applications and a microservices distributed architecture, you have to assume that something inside your cluster has been compromised,” Tipirneni said. “So just sitting behind a WAF doesn't give you adequate protection; you have to assume that every single microservice container is almost open to the Internet, metaphorically speaking. So then the question is how do you apply WAF controls? Today’s WAF has to be workload-centric, Tiperneni said. In his view, every workload has to have its own WAF. When a container launches, the WAF control is automatically spun up. So that way, even if something inside a cluste