Posts

When everything has cluster-admin, nothing is secure. Kubernetes RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) exists to answer one question: who can do what to which resources? Most clusters answer incorrectly: “everyone can do everything.” This isn’t just a security problem — it’s a resilience problem. When a service account gets compromised, how much damage can it do? When someone runs the wrong command, what’s the blast radius? Least privilege limits that radius. ...

You scanned your images with Trivy. You enforced policies with Kyverno. Your workloads have cryptographic identity via SPIFFE. But what happens after deployment? What if a container gets compromised at runtime? What if an attacker exploits a zero-day? Prevention isn’t enough. You need detection. Falco is a runtime security tool that monitors system calls in your cluster. It sees everything containers do — file access, network connections, process execution — and alerts when something looks wrong. ...

How does Service A know that Service B is actually Service B? In traditional networks, we trusted network location. If traffic came from the right IP, it was legitimate. Zero trust killed that assumption. Now every service must prove its identity, every time, regardless of network position. SPIFFE (Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone) is a standard for service identity. SPIRE is its production-ready implementation. Together, they give every workload a cryptographic identity — automatically, without static secrets. ...

Rules that exist only in documentation don’t get followed. Rules enforced by computers do. Kubernetes gives you incredible flexibility. Every team can deploy whatever they want, configured however they like. This freedom becomes chaos without guardrails. Kyverno is a policy engine for Kubernetes. It validates, mutates, and generates resources based on policies you define — as Kubernetes-native YAML. Why Kyverno? There are multiple policy engines: Open Policy Agent (OPA) with Gatekeeper, Kyverno, Kubewarden. I chose Kyverno because: ...

Kubernetes Secrets are not secrets. They’re base64-encoded plain text, stored in etcd, often visible to anyone with cluster access. This is the default, and it’s terrifying. Every cloud provider offers a Key Management Service. AWS has Secrets Manager, Google has Secret Manager, Azure has Key Vault. They work fine — until you need to migrate, or you want to understand what happens to your secrets, or you simply don’t want your most sensitive data in someone else’s infrastructure. ...