this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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After reading this article, I had a few dissenting thoughts, maybe someone will provide their perspective?

The article suggests not running critical workloads virtually based on a failure scenario of the hosting environment (such as ransomware on hypervisor).

That does allow using the 'all your eggs in one basket' phrase, so I agree that running at least one instance of a service physically could be justified, but threat actors will be trying to time execution of attacks against both if possible. Adding complexity works both ways here.

I don't really agree with the comments about not patching however. The premise that the physical workload or instance would be patched or updated more than the virtual one seems unrelated. A hesitance to patch systems is more about up time vs downtime vs breaking vs risk in my opinion.

Is your organization running critical workloads virtual like anything else, combination physical and virtual, or combination of all previous plus cloud solutions (off prem)?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

If we boil this article down to it's most basic point, it actually has nothing to do with virtualization. The true issue here is actually centralized infra/application management. The article references two ESXi CVE's that deal with compromised management interfaces. Imagine a scenario where we avoid virtualization by running Kubernetes on bare metal nodes, and each Pod gets exclusive assignment to a Node. If a threat actor has access to the Kubernetes management interface, and can exploit a vulnerability to access that management interface, it can immediately compromise everything within that Kubernetes cluster. We don't even need to have a container management platform. Imagine a collection of bare-metal nodes managed by Ansible via Ansible Automation Platform (AAP). If a threat actor has access to AAP and exploit it, it then can compromise everything managed by that AAP instance. This author fundamentally misattributes the issue to virtualization. The issue is centralized management and there are significant benefits to using higher-order centralized management solutions.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Agreed.

Dont we all use centralized management because there is cost and risk involved when we don't.

More management complexity, missed systems, etc.

So we're balancing risk vs operational costs.

Makes sense to swap out virtual for container solutions or automation solutions for discussion.

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