VMware Inc. today announced plans to acquire Octarine Inc., an Accel-backed startup that develops cybersecurity software for protecting Kubernetes clusters from hacking. 

Financial terms were not disclosed. Octarine, based in Sunnyvale, California, has raised at least $9 million in funding from Accel and its other investors, namely Battery Ventures, Liberty Technology Venture Capital and Sorenson Capital.

The Kubernetes-powered environments the startup focuses on securing are difficult to protect from cyberattacks because of their complexity. A typical Kubernetes workload has more than 30 security settings that can be configured in about a billion different combinations, which creates opportunities for human error. Octarine says its Octarine Enterprise platform can configure those settings automatically, thereby making workloads more resistant to attack while freeing up time for information technology teams. 

The startup provides other security capabilities as well. Octarine’s platform scans Kubernetes environments for malicious activity, such as an application trying to send data to an unknown external server, using a built-in network traffic inspection tool and a behavioral analysis engine. It also detects other security issues including known application vulnerabilities. 

VMware plans to combine Octarine’s software with its Carbon Black Cloud and AppDefense security products. Carbon Black Cloud is an endpoint protection platform VMware obtained through a recent $2.1 billion acquisition that can secure everything from servers to employee laptops. AppDefense is a more narrowly focused solution for protecting virtual machines and containers.

VMware also said that it will bring capabilities from the Octarine platform to its Tanzu toolkit for building Kubernetes applications. Julien Sobrier, the startup’s head of product, shared more details in a blog post. 

“Octarine detects network threats through a network IDS, giving real-time alerts to Tanzu Service Mesh about attempts to breach microservices, internal lateral movements, and any type of malicious activities,” the executive wrote.

Octarine also provides information about other risks such as unencrypted network connections. Tenzu users will be “able to create fine-grained and dynamic policies to automatically restrict or isolate potentially compromised microservices, or to isolate failing components to prevent cascading failures in your clusters,” Sobrier added.

The acquisition of Octarine underscores the growing role Kubernetes in VMware’s product strategy. To address the rapidly growing enterprise adoption of Kubernetes, VMware earlier this year rearchitected its flagship vSphere virtualization platform to support the framework. Companies using vSphere can now harness it to manage virtual machines and Kubernetes-powered containers side by side.

Octarine likewise supports both containers and virtual machines, which was no doubt one of the considerations that led VMware to swoop in. The company will integrate Octarine’s capabilities with vSphere, as well as NSX network virtualization product, as part of its roadmap. 

“We’re out to change the security industry,” VMware Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger (pictured) said in March when the Kubernetes-friendly version of vSphere debuted. “It’s broken and fragmented with too many vendors. We’re going to make it possible for applications to be born secure, live secure and die secure.”

Other players in the security market have made acquisitions of their own to address the shift to Kubernetes and containers. Last year, Palo Alto Networks Inc. bought several startups to add more container security features to its portfolio. McAfee LLC picked up NanoSec Inc. for the same reason.

Photo: SiliconANGLE