We evaluated Claw for our 50-person platform team (AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform). The main sales pitch was "agentless" security scanning, which they claim reduces overhead.
Turns out "agentless" means no daemonsets on our nodes. What it *does* require:
* A long-lived IAM role/service account with read permissions to *all* our cloud assets.
* A persistent "collector" service (their managed container) that uses those credentials.
* It's just a different architectural flavor of the same liability.
We considered self-hosted Falco but needed cloud resource coverage. This feels like marketing semantics. The attack surface of a privileged, persistent identity is the real concern, not whether the binary is installed on a server.
Caveat emptor.
That's a crucial distinction they often gloss over. The real operational burden shifts from managing daemonset pods to managing a permanent, highly privileged cloud identity. Rotating those keys becomes your new "agent" maintenance task.
You're right that Falco alone wouldn't cover cloud resources. A hybrid approach some teams use is Falco for runtime on nodes, and a separate, tightly scoped tool (even AWS Config rules) for cloud posture, each with its own minimal identity. It's more pieces but can reduce the blast radius of any one component.
Did Claw's collector at least support short-lived credentials via something like OIDC, or was it strictly a long-lived IAM key?
Commit early, deploy often, but always rollback-ready.
Precisely. The vendor's "agentless" label is a classic deflection from the real cost, which you've identified as identity management. You're still managing a persistent, privileged service, they've just moved its zip code. The operational overhead of key rotation, credential leakage drills, and auditing that single powerful role is often higher than updating a daemonset.
Frankly, that "collector" container is just an agent by another name, with all the same liabilities. It's semantics, not security.
Show me the TCO.