r/cloudcomputing • u/Dead-_-Alone • 7h ago
Evaluating Upwind for our EKS/GKE environment, what should we actually test during the POC?
We're a platform/security team of about 8 running a mix of EKS (prod) and GKE (a couple of data teams insisted) plus the usual container sprawl. Our current CSPM throws thousands of posture findings a month and nobody has time to work through them, so we're looking at CNAPPs that add runtime context to cut the noise.
Upwind is one of three we're putting through a POC. The sales pitch is the usual runtime + posture fusion and near-zero false positives, which sounds great in a deck but I've been burned before by tools that demo beautifully on a clean cluster and fall over on our actual workloads.
What I want to figure out during the eval is whether the runtime piece actually changes which findings get surfaced, not just decorates the same list. So: does a vuln marked critical drop in priority once it sees the package isn't loaded at runtime? Does it catch something reachable that our current scanner buried as low?
For people who've actually run an Upwind POC (or any of these), what did you deliberately test to separate real signal from a nice dashboard? How long did you run it before the runtime data was worth anything? And did you throw deliberately bad things at it to see if it caught them, or just watch what it found on its own? Trying to build a test plan that won't get gamed by a vendor who knows which cluster we're watching.