How to perform traffic analysis for east-west traffic control?

To perform traffic analysis for east-west traffic control, you need to monitor and analyze the communication between internal systems or services within a network, rather than traffic entering or leaving the network (north-south traffic). This is critical for identifying anomalies, optimizing performance, and enforcing security policies within a data center or cloud environment.

Steps to Perform East-West Traffic Analysis:

1. Traffic Capture: Use network monitoring tools to capture packets or flow data between internal nodes. Tools like packet sniffers (e.g., Wireshark) or flow collectors (e.g., NetFlow, sFlow) can help.
2. Data Aggregation: Aggregate traffic data to identify patterns, such as high-volume connections, frequent communication between specific services, or unusual spikes.
3. Behavioral Analysis: Establish baselines for normal traffic behavior and detect deviations, such as unexpected connections or unauthorized access attempts.
4. Security Policy Enforcement: Use the analysis to enforce micro-segmentation policies, ensuring only authorized services can communicate.

Example:

In a microservices architecture, Service A frequently communicates with Service B. If Service A suddenly starts sending large volumes of data to Service C (which it normally doesn’t interact with), this could indicate a misconfiguration or a security breach. Traffic analysis helps detect such anomalies.

For cloud environments, Tencent Cloud provides VPC Flow Logs to capture and analyze network traffic within Virtual Private Clouds. Combined with Cloud Security Center, it helps detect threats and enforce east-west traffic policies. Additionally, Tencent Cloud TKE (Tencent Kubernetes Engine) supports network policies for micro-segmentation, ensuring secure communication between pods.