Preflight is a tool to automatically perform Kubernetes cluster configuration checks using Open Policy Agent (OPA).
This repository hosts the agent part of Preflight. It sends data to the Preflight SaaS platform.
Table of Contents
Preflight was originally designed to automate Jetstack's production readiness assessments. These are consulting sessions in which a Jetstack engineer inspects a customer's cluster to suggest improvements and identify configuration issues. The product of this assessment is a report which describes any problems and offers remediation advice.
While these assessments have provided a lot of value to many customers, with a complex system like Kubernetes it's hard to thoroughly check everything. Automating the checks allows them to be more comprehensive and much faster.
The automation also allows the checks to be run repeatedly, meaning they can be deployed in-cluster to provide continuous configuration checking. This enables new interesting use cases as policy compliance audits.
The Preflight agent uses data gatherers to collect required data from Kubernetes and cloud provider APIs before formatting it as JSON for analysis. Once data has been collected, it is sent to the configured backend.
To run the Agent locally you can run:
preflight agent --agent-config-file ./path/to/agent/config/file.yaml
Or, to build and run a version from master:
go run main.go agent --agent-config-file ./path/to/agent/config/file.yaml
You can find the example agent file here.
You might also want to run a local echo server to monitor requests the agent sends:
go run main.go echo
Policies for cluster configuration are encoded into Preflight packages. Each
package focuses on a different infrastructure component, for example the gke
package provides rules for the configuration of a GKE cluster.
Preflight packages are implemented using Open Policy Agent with evaluation taking place in the SaaS backend.
The following instructions walk through the installation of the Preflight agent to gather data about cluster pods and send them to the backend for analysis.
To complete the secret manifest below, you will need to have a Preflight token.
First create a namespace for the preflight components:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
name: preflight
Next create a secret like the following, substituting your token:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
name: agent-config
namespace: preflight
type: Opaque
stringData:
config.yaml: |
schedule: "* * * * *"
token: # enter your token here
endpoint:
protocol: https
host: preflight.jetstack.io
path: /api/v1/datareadings
data-gatherers:
- name: "pods"
kind: "k8s"
config:
resource-type:
resource: pods
version: v1
Now create a service account with permissions to read cluster resources:
apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
name: agent
namespace: preflight
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
name: preflight-agent-cluster-viewer
roleRef:
apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
kind: ClusterRole
# will be able to view all resources, but not rbac and secrets
name: view
subjects:
- kind: ServiceAccount
name: agent
namespace: preflight
Finally deploy the agent:
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: agent
namespace: preflight
spec:
replicas: 1
selector:
matchLabels:
app.kubernetes.io/name: agent
template:
metadata:
labels:
app.kubernetes.io/name: agent
spec:
serviceAccountName: agent
volumes:
- name: config
secret:
secretName: agent-config
containers:
- name: agent
image: quay.io/jetstack/preflight:7d4fa467258b7592d68fd660f1fd1d42e7332231
args:
- "agent"
- "-c"
- "/etc/secrets/preflight/agent/config.yaml"
volumeMounts:
- name: config
mountPath: "/etc/secrets/preflight/agent"
readOnly: true
resources:
requests:
memory: "200Mi"
cpu: "200m"
limits:
memory: "200Mi"
cpu: "200m"