Defense in Depth - High Speed Cloud Native With Software and Hardware Protected Functions

Explore a conference talk that demonstrates how GitHub addresses massive scaling challenges while maintaining security through innovative cloud-native technologies. Learn how the combination of CNCF's Hyperlight project and WebAssembly (WASM) components creates a defense-in-depth approach for handling GitHub's enormous growth in open-source code repositories. Discover how WebAssembly functions as a "cloud native binary" that operates across multiple operating systems and architectures, while the emerging WASM component model enables cross-language compatibility with strictly scoped function capabilities. Understand how Hyperlight provides hardware-level protection for individual functions, allowing GitHub to process heavy event loads on smaller, more cost-effective virtual machines. Examine the technical strategies for scaling compute resources while minimizing security risks through radical permission scoping that grants functions only the necessary execution permissions determined by the host system. Gain insights into how this experimental approach combines software and hardware protection mechanisms to achieve both performance optimization and enhanced security in large-scale cloud-native environments.