Security and access management

Kubernetes has many built-in security features. These security features allow you to implement fine-grained network traffic control and access control to different Kubernetes APIs and services. In this section, we will discuss network security, authentication, and authorization.

Network security

By default, Kubernetes allows all Pods in a cluster to communicate with each other. To prevent unintended network traffic among different Pods, network policies can be established to specify how Pods can communicate with each other. You can think of a network policy as a network firewall that contains a list of allowed connections. Each network policy has a podSelector field, which selects a group of Pods enforced by the network policy and the allowed traffic direction (ingress or egress). The following sample policy denies all ingress traffic to all Pods, as there are no specific ingress policies defined:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy...