Containers are the modern way of running your services at scale because of the portability and lightweightness. However, due to the fact that they depend on OS multi-tenancy as they share the same host OS (usually Linux which represents a large attack surface), containers are considered providing weaker isolation than virtual machines.

We will start from discussing the security principles in running services in Google, and then summarize a list of best practices we have explored for preventing, auditing and mitigating security threats. Specifically, we will focus on the challenges we have faced at the host operating system level.