NeuVector - Container Security That Doesn't Suck (Mostly)

Container security is fucked.

Your containers are spinning up and down randomly, talking to each other in ways that would make your network engineer weep, and most security tools either block everything (breaking prod) or let everything through (defeating the point).

Traditional firewalls don't know what the hell a pod is. Vulnerability scanners find CVEs from 2003 in base images that haven't been patched since Obama was president. Most organizations tweet about being "concerned about container security" while still running legacy approaches that treat containers like fucking VMs.

The Reality of Container Security

I've debugged enough production incidents to know that container security theater is worse than no security. At least with no security, you know you're vulnerable. With bad security, you get a false sense of safety right up until someone pwns your Bitcoin exchange.

How NeuVector Actually Works

NeuVector deploys as containers in your cluster and basically spies on everything. Here's what actually happens:

It Learns Your Apps:

Instead of making you write YAML firewall policies (thank fucking god), it watches your containers for a few days and figures out what they normally do. Then it builds firewall rules automatically. This is pure magic when it works, but it completely shits the bed if you deploy new stuff during the learning phase

• learned this during a midnight deployment that took down our payment processing for 45 minutes.

Runtime Protection: It catches processes doing suspicious things in your containers

• like some asshole spawning /bin/bash where there shouldn't be one.

Works pretty well, though you'll get false positives if you're doing anything clever with init containers.

Network Segmentation: Creates a Layer 7 firewall between your containers.

This is where it gets interesting

• it actually understands HTTP and g

RPC traffic, not just ports. But it breaks if your load balancer does anything non-standard with headers (and AWS ALB loves doing non-standard shit).

Vulnerability Scanning: Scans your images for CVEs.

The scanning engine is decent, but the UI will drown you in medium-severity findings from dependencies you can't update because they'd break half your stack.

The Architecture (And What Breaks First)

NeuVector has 4 pieces that matter in production:

Controllers:

The brains. Usually the first thing to break when you upgrade Kubernetes. Run 3 in production or you'll hate yourself when one dies during a critical incident.

Enforcers: DaemonSet that runs on every node.

These actually block traffic. They crash if you're using containerd without the right flags (spent 3 hours debugging this).

Manager: The web UI.

Built with Angular and Scala because someone wanted to be fancy. Looks like it was designed in 2015 but works once you get past the visual pain.

Scanners: Resource-hungry image scanners that will steal CPU from your actual workloads if you don't set proper limits.

Deployment Gotchas (You Will Hit These)

Container Runtime Hell:

If you're using containerd, you need --set containerd.enabled=true or the enforcers won't start. The error message is "Unknown container runtime"

• completely fucking useless. Took me an hour scrolling through Git

Hub issues to figure this out, and another 2 hours when I realized K3s 1.28.2 changes the socket path again.

K3s is Special: Use --set k3s.enabled=true if you're on K3s.

Because K3s puts socket files in weird places for no good reason.

Memory Limits: Default memory limits are way too low.

You'll get OOMKilled (exit code 137) in production. Start with 512Mi for enforcers and 1Gi for controllers.

cgroup v2: If you're on Ubuntu 22.04+, make sure cgroup v2 is enabled.

The pods crash loop with cryptic errors on v 1.

When NOT to Use NeuVector

Skip NeuVector if:

• You deploy constantly (learning phase never finishes)
• You have weird networking (custom CNI plugins confuse it)
• You can't tolerate network latency (adds 1-2ms per request)
• Your cluster is under-resourced (needs 4GB+ RAM total)

The GitHub issues section is where you'll spend your time debugging why your specific setup doesn't work. Community discussions are more helpful than docs for edge cases.

Reality check complete. Now let's talk about actually getting this deployed...

Getting NeuVector Running (The Hard Way)

Deploying NeuVector looks simple in the docs, but here's what actually happens when you try it in production. The GitHub examples get you started, but they're missing the edge cases that break everything at 2am.

The Installation Command That Actually Works

Forget the basic helm install from the docs. Here's what you'll end up using after 3 hours of troubleshooting:

helm upgrade --install neuvector neuvector/core \
  --namespace neuvector --create-namespace \
  --set tag=5.4.4 \
  --set registry=docker.io \
  --set containerd.enabled=true \
  --set k3s.enabled=true \
  --set controller.replicas=3 \
  --set manager.env.ssl=off \
  --set cve.scanner.internal.certificate.secret=\"\" \
  --set controller.resources.limits.memory=1Gi \
  --set enforcer.resources.limits.memory=512Mi

Why these flags matter:

• containerd.enabled=true: Without this, enforcers crash with "Unknown container runtime"
• k3s.enabled=true: K3s has special socket paths that aren't documented well
• controller.replicas=3: The default of 1 will bite you when you upgrade Kubernetes
• ssl=off: SSL cert issues will lock you out of the UI for hours
• Memory limits: Default limits are way too low for production workloads

Multi-Cloud Reality Check

NeuVector runs on AWS EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE, but each cloud provider has special ways to break your deployment:

AWS EKS Issues:

• Bottlerocket needs custom containerd socket paths (not documented anywhere obvious)
• Fargate is a no-go (needs DaemonSet access to nodes)
• ALB does weird header manipulation that confuses network learning

Azure AKS Pain Points:

• Windows node pools need separate enforcer configs (because of course they fucking do)
• Azure CNI fights with network policies (cilium works better)
• AKS 1.28+ upgrades randomly break enforcer communications with error "failed to connect to controller:11443"

Google GKE Problems:

• Autopilot doesn't allow privileged access (makes sense but breaks everything)
• GKE network policies conflict with NeuVector's
• Container-Optimized OS needs additional security contexts

Production Scaling Issues

Memory and CPU Reality

The "lightweight" marketing is about as accurate as weather forecasts. Here's actual resource usage in a decent-sized cluster:

• Controllers: 1-2GB RAM each, 200-500m CPU under load
• Enforcers: 300-800MB RAM per node, 100-300m CPU depending on traffic
• Manager: 512MB-1GB RAM, minimal CPU
• Scanners: 2-4GB RAM when scanning, minimal when idle

The math: For a 20-node cluster, you're looking at 8-12GB RAM just for NeuVector. Budget accordingly.

Network Performance Hit

The claimed "<1ms latency" is best case. In real production:

• HTTP traffic: 1-3ms additional latency
• gRPC with heavy payloads: 5-15ms impact
• TLS termination inside containers: 10-50ms depending on complexity

Workaround: Run performance tests before and after. You'll probably need to bump your connection pool sizes from 20 to 50 and increase request timeouts by 10-20ms. Found this out when our mobile app started timing out randomly after enabling enforcement.

Enterprise Integration Hell

SIEM Integration That Actually Works

Syslog integration works, but the format is annoying:

## You'll need this rsyslog config to parse NeuVector events
$template NeuVectorFormat,\"%msg:2:$%
\"
if $programname contains \"NeuVector\" then {
    *.* /var/log/neuvector.log;NeuVectorFormat
    stop
}

Splunk users: The built-in NeuVector Splunk app is more confusing than fucking YAML indentation rules. Write your own queries or you'll spend more time debugging the integration than actual security events.

LDAP Integration Gotchas

LDAP authentication works but has weird requirements:

• Needs anonymous bind enabled (security teams hate this)
• Group membership detection is flaky with nested groups
• SAML is better but needs a SUSE support contract for setup help

Compliance Reality Check

NeuVector covers CIS Kubernetes benchmarks and basic compliance, but:

What works:

• CIS benchmark scanning catches real misconfigurations
• Policy violation reporting works for basic cases
• Audit logs are comprehensive (maybe too much)

What's missing:

• SOC 2 Type II needs manual report interpretation
• PCI DSS coverage is basic - need additional controls
• GDPR compliance is mostly documentation templates

Real Deployment Timeline

Week 1: Install NeuVector, discover containerd issues, fix configurations
Week 2: Learning mode - watch it discover your applications
Week 3: Fine-tune policies, deal with false positives
Week 4: Enable enforcement, fight with legitimate traffic being blocked
Week 5: Realize you need more memory, resize everything
Week 6: Finally stable, but you're questioning your life choices

Pro tip: Plan 2-3 months for production deployment, not the "30-60 minutes" marketing bullshit. I learned this the hard way when our NeuVector deployment took down half our microservices for 4 hours because the learning phase decided our ETL batch jobs were malicious during a Friday evening deployment. Spent the entire weekend explaining to leadership why our "security enhancement" caused a 4-hour outage.

Marketing timelines are lies.

SUSE support is helpful once you get past Level 1, but expect to spend time in GitHub issues for edge cases.

Now that you know what you're getting into deployment-wise, let me answer the questions you're probably already thinking about...