Kubernetes Best Practices

Chapter 11. Policy and Governance for Your Cluster

Have you ever wondered how you can ensure that all containers running on a cluster come only from an approved container registry? Or maybe you’ve been asked to ensure that services are never exposed to the internet. These are precisely the problems that policy and governance for your cluster set out to answer. As Kubernetes matures and becomes adopted by more and more enterprises, the question of policy and governance is becoming increasingly frequent. Although this area is still relatively new and upcoming, in this chapter we share what you can do to make sure that your cluster is in compliance with the defined policies of your enterprise.

Why Policy and Governance Are Important

Whether you operate in a highly regulated environment—for example, health care or financial services—or you simply want to make sure that you maintain a level of control over what’s running on your clusters, you’re going to need a way to implement the stated policies of the enterprise. After these policies are defined, you will need to determine how to implement policy and maintain clusters that are compliant to these policies. These policies might be in place to meet regulatory compliance or simply to enforce best practices. Whatever the reason, you must be sure that you do not sacrifice developer agility and self-service when implementing these policies.

How Is This Policy Different?

In Kubernetes, policy is everywhere. Whether it be network policy ...