Gatekeeper 3.14: Policy Enforcement Evolution

Introduction

Gatekeeper 3.14, released on September 10, 2024, advances Kubernetes policy enforcement with enhanced OPA integration, improved performance, better policy management, and expanded validation capabilities. This release makes policy enforcement more powerful and efficient.

OPA Integration

• OPA engine improvements provide better integration with Open Policy Agent.
• Policy language enhancements enable more expressive policy definitions.
• Data integration improvements enable better access to cluster data for policy evaluation.
• Performance optimizations reduce latency for policy evaluation.

Performance Improvements

1. Policy evaluation optimizations reduce latency for admission control decisions.
2. Caching enhancements improve response times for frequently evaluated policies.
3. Resource usage optimizations reduce memory and CPU consumption.
4. Concurrent processing improvements enable better handling of high-throughput workloads.

Policy Management

• Policy templates enable reusable policy components.
• Policy libraries provide pre-built policies for common use cases.
• Policy versioning enables management of policy versions and rollback.
• Policy testing improvements enable better validation of policies before deployment.

Validation Capabilities

• Resource validation enables validation of Kubernetes resources.
• Custom validation enables validation using custom logic.
• Constraint templates provide flexible constraint definitions.
• Audit capabilities enable detection of policy violations in existing resources.

Getting Started

# Install Gatekeeper
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/open-policy-agent/gatekeeper/release-3.14/deploy/gatekeeper.yaml

Create a ConstraintTemplate:

apiVersion: templates.gatekeeper.sh/v1beta1
kind: ConstraintTemplate
metadata:
  name: k8srequiredlabels
spec:
  crd:
    spec:
      names:
        kind: K8sRequiredLabels
      validation:
        openAPIV3Schema:
          type: object
          properties:
            labels:
              type: array
              items:
                type: string
  targets:
    - target: admission.k8s.gatekeeper.sh
      rego: |
        package k8srequiredlabels
        violation[{"msg": msg}] {
          required := input.parameters.labels
          provided := input.review.object.metadata.labels
          missing := required[_]
          not provided[missing]
          msg := sprintf("Missing required label: %v", [missing])
        }

Summary

Gatekeeper 3.14 continues to be a leading policy enforcement solution, providing teams with powerful and flexible policy capabilities.