Use case
Enforcing Image Security with Gatekeeper
in Kubernetes
- Lavish Gupta
About the Customer
CyvexTech specializes in delivering advanced security solutions for DevOps environments. Their mission is to ensure robust security practices within Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures, helping organizations implement scalable and secure infrastructure.
Customer Challenge
Managing Kubernetes clusters requires stringent security and compliance measures, particularly for container images. CyvexTech faced challenges in preventing unauthorized or unsigned container images from being deployed in the Kubernetes environment. This posed significant security risks, and they needed an efficient policy enforcement mechanism to ensure all images were signed and verified before deployment.
Solution
IAMOPS integrated Gatekeeper, a Kubernetes admission controller, with Valint to enforce security policies on all container images. The solution automated policy enforcement to ensure images met security and compliance standards. Key elements of the solution included:
- Gatekeeper: Used to enforce policies on container images in the Kubernetes cluster.
- Valint Provider: Integrated for image signing and verification.
- Automation Tools: Tools like Terraform, Argo CD, and GitHub Workflows were leveraged to automate infrastructure provisioning, policy enforcement, and deployment processes.
- Continuous Compliance: The solution implemented continuous compliance checks using Valint, ensuring security policies were enforced throughout the lifecycle of the development and deployment processes.
- Alerting and Monitoring: Set up alerts from Grafana to monitor Docker image verification processes. When an image verification fails or an image is not compliant with necessary policies, alerts are sent directly to Slack channels. This ensures immediate awareness and prompt remediation of any issues.
Semantic Release Workflow
Results & Benefits
The integration of Gatekeeper and Valint delivered several key outcomes:
- Enhanced Security Posture: Policies ensured only signed and verified images were deployed, reducing security risks.
- Real-Time Alerting: Immediate notifications via Slack allowed the team to quickly address non-compliant images or verification failures.
- Operational Efficiency: Automation improved collaboration between development and operations teams, leading to faster, more secure deployments.
- Consistent Policy Application: Security policies were consistently enforced across all environments—development, staging, and production.
- Cost Savings: Preventing unauthorized image deployments reduced security incidents and associated costs.
About IAMOPS
IAMOPS is a full DevOps suite company that supports technology companies to achieve intense production readiness.
Our mission is to ensure that our clients’ infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines are scalable, mitigate failure points, optimize performance, ensure uptime, and minimize costs.
Our DevOps suite includes DevOps Core, NOC 24/7, FinOps, QA Automation, and DevSecOps to accelerate overall exponential growth.
As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner and Reseller, we focus on two key pillars: Professionalism by adhering to best practices and utilizing advanced technologies, and Customer Experience with responsiveness, availability, clear project management, and transparency to provide an exceptional experience for our clients.
