Even well protected workloads may be compromised by 0-days and platform vulnerabilities. Observability is essential for detecting and stopping an attack before infrastructure and information is compromised. Shopify uses open source Falco, a CNCF incubating project, to track syscalls at the kernel level and reveal them to a Kubernetes-aware process in userspace. That uses predefined rules to decide which events to log. Additional tooling filters and aggregates logs, and generates alerts when suspicious activity is detected.

In this talk, Shane will describe how Shopify first deployed Falco in 2018 and continues to use it to monitor critical systems, including those that process payment card information. He will share tips and tricks for getting the most out of Falco, areas for improvement, and use cases for detecting compromise or data exfiltration when all else fails.