Kubewarden vs OPA Gatekeeper

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This page has been written during August 2023. Both projects might have evolved since then.

If you find something is missing or inaccurate, please file an issue or open a PR using the link at the bottom of the page.

Both OPA Gatekeeper and Kubewarden are open source projects, and part of CNCF.

This table provides a comparison between OPA Gatekeeper and Kubewarden. Topics requiring more information have links to further explanation.

	OPA Gatekeeper	Kubewarden
Validation	✅	✅
Mutation	✅	✅
Policy language [1]	Rego	Rego, Go, Rust,...
Context aware [2]	✅	✅
Kubernetes integration [3]	cluster wide CRD	cluster wide and namespaced CRDs
Policy distribution [4]	embedded into Kubernetes CR	Container registry
CI/CD integration [5]	✅	✅
Policy enforcement modes	deny, warn	deny, warn
Deployment mode [6]	single evaluation server	multiple evaluation servers
Background checks [7]	✅	✅

Types of policies

Both OPA Gatekeeper and Kubernetes can write validation and mutation policies.

These policies can target any kind of Kubernetes resource, including Custom Resources.

Writing policies

OPA Gatekeeper policies are written using Rego. Rego is a query language created by the Open Policy Agent project.

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Rego can only be used to write validating policies. Mutating policies do not use Rego, instead using ad-hoc rules defined in YAML (see here).

Kubewarden allows policies to be written using different paradigms. Policy authors can use both traditional programming languages (like Go, Rust and others) or Domain Specific Languages like Rego. Kubewarden's validating and mutating policies are written in the same way.

caution

Rego is used by the kube-mgmt open source project, which is part of the Open Policy Agent project.

Despite using the same language, policies written for kube-mgmt are not compatible with OPA Gatekeeper and vice versa.

Kubewarden can use Rego policies that have been written for both Open Policy Agent and for OPA Gatekeeper. More information is here.

Context aware

Sometimes a policy needs data about the current state of the cluster to make a validation/mutation decision. For example, a policy validating Ingress resources might need to know the other Ingress resources already defined inside of the cluster to ensure no clashes happen. These kind of policies are called "context aware".

Both OPA Gatekeeper and Kubewarden support these types of policies.

When deploying OPA Gatekeeper, a Kubernetes administrator decides which type of cluster data should be made available to the policies at evaluation time.

It's important to highlight how this data is then accessible by all the policies deployed.

For example, if an OPA Gatekeeper policy requires access to Kubernetes Secrets, all the other policies being deployed will be able to read this data as well.

On the other hand, Kubewarden provides a granular access to cluster resources. Each policy has access only to the resources that the Kubernetes administrator specified. Attempting to read unauthorized data is immediately blocked and reported to the cluster administrators.

Kubernetes integration

OPA Gatekeeper has a cluster wide Custom Resource that allows policy definition and how and where to enforce them.

Kubewarden has two different types of Custom Resources used to declare policies. One works at the Cluster level, the other is namespaced. The namespaced Custom Resource is called AdmissionPolicy.

Policies deployed via a AdmissionPolicy resource affect only the resources created within the Namespace they belong to. Because of that, non-admin Kubernetes users could be allowed the RBAC privileges to manage AdmissionPolicy resources inside of the Namespaces they have access to.

This allows Kubernetes administrators to delegate some policy-related work.

Policy distribution

The source code of the policy (the Rego code) has to be written inside the Custom Resource that defines a policy inside Kubernetes.

Kubewarden policies are managed like container images. Once built, they are pushed into container registries as OCI artifacts.

Kubewarden policies can be signed and verified using container image tools like cosign, from the Sigstore project.

Kubewarden policies can be distributed among geographically distributed container registries using the traditional tools and processes adopted for container images.

CI/CD integration

Both OPA Gatekeeper and Kubewarden can be managed using GitOps methodologies.

However, in the context of OPA Gatekeeper, there's a coupling between the policy's source code (the Rego code) and the Custom Resource used to deploy it inside of Kubernetes. This introduces extra steps inside of CI/CD pipelines.

Rego has testing tools that allow the creation of unit test suites. Writing tests and executing them inside a CI/CD pipeline is essential to ensure policies behave as expected.

To use these testing tools, the source code of the policy must be made available inside of dedicated text files. It's not possible to read the source code from the YAML files used to declare the OPA Gatekeeper policy. The CI/CD pipeline must keep in sync the Rego source code being tested with the code defined inside of the OPA Gatekeeper Custom Resource. This can be done using some 3rd party tools.

Kubewarden policies have CI/CD pipelines like traditional microservices. Usually their source code lives inside a Git repository and then, using traditional CI/CD systems, unit tests are ran against it. The unit tests are written using the testing frameworks of the language used to write the policy. Once all the tests pass the policy is compiled to WebAssembly and pushed to a container registry. This kind of pipeline is usually maintained by the policy author.

Kubernetes administrators typically maintain other automation pipelines that react to new releases of the policy (leveraging automation tools like Dependabot, Renovate bot, updatecli and others), or to changes to the policy configuration.

The pipeline tests the policy against different types of requests. The testing can be done using the kwctl cli tool, without requiring a running Kubernetes cluster. kwctl uses the same evaluation engine used by the Kubewarden stack deployed inside of a Kubernetes cluster.

Policy enforcement modes

Both OPA Gatekeeper and Kubewarden can deploy policies using two different operation modes:

• deny: violation of a policy causes the request to be rejected
• warn: violation of a policy does not cause rejection. The violation is logged for auditing purposes

Deployment mode

All the OPA Gatekeeper policies are evaluated by the same server. On the other hand, Kubewarden allows multiple evaluation servers to be defined. These servers are defined by a Custom Resource called PolicyServer.

When declaring a Kubewarden policy, the Kubernetes administrator decides which PolicyServer will host it.

note

The PolicyServer object is a high level abstraction introduced by Kubewarden. Behind the scenes a Deployment with a specific replica size is created.

Each PolicyServer can have a different replica size from others.

This allows interesting scenarios like the following ones:

• Deploy critical policies to a dedicated Policy Server pool
• Deploy the policies of a noisy tenant to a dedicated Policy Server pool

Background checks

As policies are added, removed, and reconfigured the resources already inside of the cluster might become non-compliant.

Both OPA Gatekeeper and Kubewarden have a scanner that operates in the background. This scanner evaluates resources already defined inside the cluster and flags non-compliant ones.

The only difference between OPA Gatekeeper and Kubewarden is how the scanner results are saved.

OPA Gatekeeper adds the violation details to the status field of a given Constraint Custom Resource (see here).

Kubewarden instead stores the results inside of a set of the Policy Report Custom Resources defined by the Policy Report working group.