Looking at runtime security for our K8s clusters. Need to move fast and this is a key blocker.
Our stack: AWS EKS, GitLab CI, ArgoCD, a mix of custom apps and third-party services. RevOps background means I care about clean integration into existing pipelines and alerting (PagerDuty, Slack).
Primary requirements:
* Must integrate at deployment stage (image scan) and runtime.
* Low false-positive rate is critical—team will ignore noisy alerts.
* Must have clear, actionable findings. "Critical vulnerability" needs to tell us the exact resource and remediation step.
* Cost predictability. Per-node, per-container? How does scaling affect it?
Considering Aqua Security and Sysdig Secure. Need concrete differences on:
* Deployment overhead on the cluster.
* Quality of out-of-the-box policies for K8s best practices.
* How well each integrates with a GitOps workflow (Argo).
* The actual workflow for whitelisting false positives—is it a CLI command, UI, or a code commit?
Anyone run both in production? What broke, what worked?
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You've perfectly described the trap these platforms set with "low false-positive rate is critical." Both will swear up and down their default policies are tuned for this, but in the real world, they're anything but. You'll spend your first month drowning in alerts about init containers mounting the kubelet socket or your own CI tools doing privileged operations.
The integration story is where they really diverge. Aqua will try to sell you on embedding their scanner deep into your GitLab pipeline, which sounds clean until you're debugging scan timeouts that block deployments. Sysdig's approach feels more bolted-on after the fact. For your ArgoCD workflow, that actually might be simpler - a failed policy check in Argo happens *before* the rollout, not during a build.
Cost predictability? Forget it. Per-container sounds great until you realize every sidecar and temporary job pod counts. Your bill will scale directly with your developers' ability to remember to clean up test namespaces.
Trust but verify