Introducing Network Policies

Security is something that all Kubernetes users should think about from day 1. By default, every pod in a cluster can communicate with any other pod in the cluster, even other namespaces that you may not own. While this is a basic Kubernetes concept, it’s not ideal for most enterprises, and when using multi-tenant clusters, it becomes a big security concern. We need to increase the security and isolation of workloads, which can be a very complex task, and this is where network policies come in.

NetworkPolicies provide users the ability to control their network traffic for both egress and ingress using a defined set of rules between pods, namespaces, and external endpoints. Think of a network policy as a firewall for your clusters, providing fine-grained access controls based on various parameters. Using network policies, you can control which pods are allowed to communicate with other pods, restrict traffic to specific protocols or ports, and...