Mutating objects and default values
Until this point, everything we have discussed has been about how to use Gatekeeper to enforce a policy. Kubernetes has another feature called mutating admission webhooks that allows a webhook to change, or mutate, an object before the API server processes it and runs validating admission controllers.
A common usage of a mutating webhook is to explicitly set security context information on pods that don’t have it set. For instance, if you create a pod with no spec.securityContext.runAsUser, then the pod will run as the user the Docker container was built to run using the USER directive (or root by default) when it was built. This is insecure since it means you could be running as root, especially if the container in question is from Docker Hub. While you can have a policy that blocks running as root, you could also have a mutating webhook that will set a default user ID if it’s not specified to make it a default. This makes for...
