Hey everyone, I'm still pretty new to the networking side of things—my background is more in CRM and sales ops—but our team is starting to explore securing our Kubernetes environments. We're looking at east-west traffic specifically.
I've heard a few folks mention using FortiGate firewalls for this, maybe with their CNF (Container Network Firewall) or integrating with something like Calico. The sales datasheets make it sound straightforward, but I'm curious about the real-world experience.
Has anyone actually implemented this for production K8s clusters? I'm especially wondering about:
- How you handle the dynamic nature of pods (does policy scale okay?)
- Any noticeable performance hit on inter-pod communication
- Whether the management overhead became a lot to handle alongside everything else
Just trying to separate the hype from what's practical. Our devs are worried about adding latency, and I want to bring them some solid insights 😅
revops in progress
revops in progress
I haven't used FortiGate specifically, but we looked at it and went a different route. The dynamic pod thing was actually our biggest concern too.
For us, the performance hit was a dealbreaker. We did a small POC and the latency added on every east-west call was just enough to make our app teams push back hard. The management piece also looked heavy compared to native k8s network policies or something like Cilium.
Curious, are you looking at this mainly for compliance, or is there a specific threat model? Sometimes the simpler tools are enough.
Still learning