Security Challenges of Breaking A Monolith

How can a single vulnerability in one container compromise your entire system? Discover the hidden security risks of breaking up a monolith.

#1about 7 minutes

Understanding the problems with a monolithic architecture

A monolithic video processing application faces challenges with scaling, high costs from idle power, and a lack of reliability.

#2about 2 minutes

Decomposing the monolith into a microservice architecture

The application is broken down into distinct services like an API, a message broker, a transcoding worker, and S3 storage.

#3about 2 minutes

Securing container images and the software supply chain

The initial step of containerization reveals that official base images often contain known vulnerabilities, highlighting supply chain risks.

#4about 4 minutes

Defining trust boundaries for authentication and authorization

Breaking down the application creates new trust boundaries between frontend and backend components, requiring robust authentication and authorization.

#5about 8 minutes

Using bucket policies and pre-signed URLs for S3 access

AWS S3 access is controlled using bucket policies for broad rules and pre-signed URLs for providing temporary, specific access to objects.

#6about 3 minutes

Preventing malicious uploads with input validation

An AWS Lambda function can be triggered on file uploads to S3 to perform validation and prevent attackers from hosting malicious content.

#7about 5 minutes

Analyzing the impact of a container vulnerability

A vulnerability in a transcoding library like FFmpeg can be exploited through a malicious file, leading to code execution and access to secrets within the container.

#8about 2 minutes

Comparing security trade-offs of monoliths vs microservices

While microservices increase the attack surface and complexity, they offer better isolation, making privilege escalation more difficult than in a monolith.

#9about 11 minutes