The life cycle of one or more containers related to one or more containerized applications is managed by determining that a predefined retention time for a first container of the plurality of containers has elapsed; in response to the determining, performing the following honeypot container creation steps: suspending new session traffic to the first container; maintaining the first container as a honeypot container; and identifying communications sent to the honeypot container as an anomalous communication. Alert notifications are optionally generated for the anomalous communication.