security

Hands-on with Kubernetes Pod Security Policies

Kubernetes Pod Security Policies allow you to control the security specifications that pods must adhere to in order to run in your cluster. You can block users from deploying inherently insecure pods either intentionally or unintentionally. This sounds like a great feature and a security best practice and can be a big step toward keeping your cluster free of insecure resources.

However, some pods may require additional security permissions beyond what most cluster users are allowed to deploy. For example, monitoring or metrics tooling may need host network access or may need to run in privileged mode. Also, you may need to allow developers to run applications with additional capabilities during early development stages just to make progress.

How hard is it to use Pod Security Policies to judiciously secure your cluster? We’ll look at that in this blog post.

Who Can…?

Managing a Kubernetes cluster with one user is easy. Once you go beyond one user, you need to start using Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). I’ve delved into this topic several times in the past with posts on how to Create a Kubernetes User Sandbox in Docker Enterprise and Functional Kubernetes Namespaces in Docker Enterprise. But, once you get beyond a couple of users and/or teams and a few namespaces for them, it quickly becomes difficult to keep track of who can do what and where. And, as time goes on and more and more people have a hand in setting up your RBAC, it can get even more confusing. You can and should have your RBAC resource definitions in source control but it’s not easy to read and is hard to visualize. Enter the open source who-can kubectl plugin from the folks at Aqua Security. It gives you the ability to show who (subjects) can do what (verbs) to what (resources) and where (namespaces).