Production Environment

CoreOS

The recommended way to run Falco on CoreOS is inside of its own Docker container using the install commands in the Docker section. This method allows full visibility into all containers on the host OS.

This method is automatically updated, includes some nice features such as automatic setup and bash completion, and is a generic approach that can be used on other distributions outside CoreOS as well.

However, some users may prefer to run Falco in the CoreOS toolbox. While not the recommended method, this can be achieved by installing Falco inside the toolbox using the normal installation method, and then manually running the falco-driver-loader script:

toolbox --bind=/dev --bind=/var/run/docker.sock
curl -s https://falco.org/script/install | bash
falco-driver-loader

GKE

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) uses Container-Optimized OS (COS) as the default operating system for its worker node pools. COS is a security-enhanced operating system that limits access to certain parts of the underlying OS. Because of this security constraint, Falco cannot insert its kernel module to process events for system calls. However, COS provides the ability to leverage eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) to supply the stream of system calls to the Falco engine.

Falco can use eBPF with minimal configuration changes. To do so, set the FALCO_BPF_PROBE environment variable to an empty value: FALCO_BPF_PROBE="".

eBPF is currently supported only on GKE and COS, however here we provide installation details for a wider set of platforms

When using the official container images, setting this environment variable will trigger the falco-driver-loader script to download the kernel headers for the appropriate version of COS, and then compile the appropriate eBPF probe. In all the other environments you can call the falco-driver-loader script yourself to obtain it in this way:

sudo FALCO_VERSION="0.29.0" FALCO_BPF_PROBE="" falco-driver-loader

To execute the script above successfully, you will need clang and llvm installed.

If you are installing Falco from packages, you will need to edit the falco systemd unit.

You can do that by executing the following command:

systemctl edit falco

It will open your editor, at this point you can set the environment variable for the unit by adding this content to the file:

[Service]
Environment='FALCO_BPF_PROBE=""'

If you are installing Falco with Helm, you will need to set the ebpf.enabled option to true:

helm install falco falcosecurity/falco --set ebpf.enabled=true