The Kubernetes community created a feature in v1.10 called Pod Security Policy (PSP) to control the security-related fields for pods defined in your Kubernetes cluster. Now that PSP is being deprecated in Kubernetes v1.21, what should you do to secure your Kubernetes cluster? In this blog, we’ll learn a bit about PSP, explore why it’s being deprecated and how Open Policy Agent (OPA) can ease the migration from PSP.
The shift to cloud-native has transformed the way organizations do business, keep up with the competition and meet the demands of customer expectations. From the infrastructure that maintains IT operations to the applications that supply customers with the ability to interact with their data, the velocity in which DevOps teams have to deliver these services has significantly increased, leaving little to no room for error.
When introducing Open Policy Agent (OPA) to application developers and platform engineers, I normally end my presentation with a bulleted list detailing what I think are the best steps to take to start learning OPA and its declarative policy language, Rego.
Few things in recent years have changed the game plan of the tech organization as much as the infrastructure as code movement. With infrastructure itself largely having moved into the cloud, automating provisioning, upgrades and management of that infrastructure was a natural next step.
As anyone who has built or introduced a new project or product knows, success doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and patience. When we first started the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project in 2016, we didn’t just spend all of our time on code — a lot of it was spent building awareness around the project and the community. As OPA started gaining traction, we were encouraged every time we’d hear a developer talk about OPA at a conference or mention it in a blog post.
Capital One Financial Corporation is the nation’s largest direct bank. They have a well-earned reputation as a data and tech pioneer in the financial services industry and have long been progressive in setting a bold agenda around digital and tech transformation. This has meant operating years ahead of most enterprises in moving to the cloud, scaling in-house engineering workforce and adopting agile, microservices, open source and a modern data ecosystem.
Today, more organizations than ever use Open Policy Agent (OPA) as the de facto standard for policy enforcement across the cloud native stack. A graduated project from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), OPA has dozens of use cases — from Kubernetes guardrails, to microservices authorization, to infrastructure-as-a-service controls — that are leveraged by millions of users.
Today, if you’re running Kubernetes, you know that security is not “built-in.” To secure your clusters, you have to configure, add or build in additional controls. Some are part of Kubernetes, like role-based access control (RBAC), but other best practices include specifying trusted repositories for known-good containers and then layering in runtime scanning tools as well.
Uptime. Reliability. Efficiency. These used to be perks, elements of forward-thinking and premium-level enterprises. Now they’re a baseline expectation. Today, consumers expect information, resources, and services to be available on-demand, updated in real time, and accessible without fuss. Imagine trying to Google something or place an order from Amazon only to be told, “Please try again in 48 hours. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
