The burgeoning container ecosystem grew even bigger this morning after Twistlock exited stealth to tackle what is arguably biggest challenge standing in the way of making the technology ready for production use: security. The ambitious startup believes that the solution starts at the development phase of the application lifecycle.

The small footprint of containers has made the virtualization format immensely popular in fast-paced continuous delivery environments where new features and enhancements are released daily instead of monthly as is the norm in many enterprises, but that productivity improvement is a double-edged sword. More changes means more opportunities to introduce vulnerabilities into the application, a risk that Twistlock promises to help address.

The startup’s namesake system enables organizations to establish automated controls that verify that container images meet certain security criteria before rolling out to the live environment. From there, the software keeps track of instances using agents installed on each production server that scan the processes running inside for potential threats and plugs into the management daemon to provide administrators with a view of their operations.

While essential for every workload, that kind of visibility is especially important when it comes to container-based applications, which are often spread across thousands of instances that each represent a potential target. According to Twistlock, its software addresses the gap between traditional monitoring solutions that can’t reach inside containers and the lackluster operational tools available for the technology in the container ecosystem.

The information collected through the agents is displayed in a centralized management console that provides a consolidated view of container clusters. Administrators can use that knowledge to define security permits for the underlying infrastructure that are then propagated back to the agents, which enforce the policy on their respective hosts.

That hardening manifests in the form of highly modulated access to sensitive parts of the operating system and caps on the amount of capacity available to each container. Organizations have until now been left mostly to their own devices to implement that isolation, which increases the risk of vulnerabilities and thereby undermines the main security mechanism of the technology.

Twistlock’s software is already finding success among four major customers in the U.S. and Israel, traction that the 10-person team hopes to grow with $2.5 million in seed funding from YL Ventures announced on occasion of the launch that will help bolster headcount in preparation for hitting general availability. The startup is mainly targeting bleeding-edge organizations at the forefront of container adoption, particularly service providers and top financial institutions.
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