network-mapper VS credentials-operator

Yep! When you deploy Otterize, you get a map of your cluster’s traffic, with zero-configuration, through the open-source network-mapper.

After multiple iterations, research sessions and some trial & error, we could produce an exportable list of network connections in any Kubernetes cluster. You might recall that our larger goal was to get to a logical (functional) map of pod-to-pod traffic, and that will be covered in a future posting. After adding that capability, here’s an example output from our project, now called network-mapper, when pointed at one of the clusters in our “lab” environment:

It'll require some changes but you can go for it if that's something up your alley, as after all, it's all open source - https://github.com/otterize/network-mapper

We received some great feedback from the community regarding our tool, and one of the most commonly requested features was visualization. So we embedded this functionality into the tool, and now you can easily map and visualize your cluster with a single CLI command.

As you've mentioned, it is not possible to define deny rules using the native NetworkPolicy resource. Instead, you could use your CNI’s implementation for network policies. If you use Calico as your CNI you can use Calico's network policies to create deny rules. You can also take a look at Otterize OSS, an open-source solution my team and I are working on recently. It simplifies network policies by defining them from the client’s perspective in a ClientIntents resource. You can use the network mapper to auto-generate those ClientIntents from the traffic in your cluster, and then deploy them and let the intents-operator manage the network policies for you.

No more! The open-source intents-operator and credentials-operator enable you to achieve the same, except without all that work: do it all from Kubernetes, declaratively, and just-in-time, through the magic of IBAC (intent-based access control).

Otterize Credential Operator ( https://github.com/otterize/credentials-operator ) helps you automatically provision credentials as Kubernetes secrets (using a self-hosted SPIRE or a free SaaS solution). You can use pod annotations to determine the certificate's domain names (as well as many other properties). I think it is a straightforward approach to managing trust, especially for a relatively small cluster where you manage everything. (Full disclosure: I am one of the contributors to this project)

Have you taken a look at using SPIRE to create the TLS certificates and attesting about the workload identity? You could couple SPIRE server with the Otterize SPIRE integration operator to declaratively generate TLS certificates. This could be easier to deploy than a service mesh and sidecars, depending on your use case - what the clients are and what the servers are.

You could create JWT or mTLS-based identities, and then verify those in your middleware. If you are on Kubernetes, you might try using SPIRE together with the SPIRE integration operator to automatically issue identities as Kubernetes secrets, which you could then use to connect between services.

In practice, the technical part is implemented by the DevOps/platform team. The way in which you declare and get access to these secrets varies, but can be one of the cloud provider secret managers (e.g. AWS Secret Manager), Hashicorp Vault, or if you're on Kubernetes, could be something like cert-manager, Hashicorp Vault sidecars, or SPIRE coupled with the Otterize SPIRE integration.

If this seems a bit complicated, you could use SPIRE server to issue certificates and Otterize SPIRE integration operator to renew them in Kubernetes and update Secrets.