Hey everyone! I'm currently interning as a DevOps engineer, and I've been tasked with creating NetworkPolicies for various namespaces and applications in our existing Kubernetes cluster. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed and unsure about the best strategy to implement these policies without disrupting anything that's already running. Any tips, best practices, or steps I should consider to do this safely?
3 Answers
I think you should gather a comprehensive list of all the services that need to communicate with the pods or vice versa. Start defining policies based on their impact and likelihood of causing issues. Focus on the crucial services first, like public ones. If you try to policy every single service from the get-go, you may complicate things when new services are added since you'll need to consistently update a bunch of policies, which can fail quietly. Just something to consider!
Before you start creating policies, you need to identify which network flows are actually required. You can use observability tools like Cilium Hubble or refer to your existing specs for this. Make a list of all workloads that need to connect and then define your ingress network policies accordingly. Just a heads-up: if you miss any flows, it could lead to production issues, so it's crucial to test everything in a non-prod environment first!
Check out the NetworkPolicy editor made by the Cilium team. It's super handy for creating policies as it works with both the Cilium API and the standard Kubernetes API. Just set the namespace or pod context you're looking to manage, and it will generate the YAML policy for you. Also, using tools like Hubble can help you visualize existing traffic, letting you understand incoming and outgoing flows better so you can craft your policies effectively. By the way, here's the link to the editor: [**editor.networkpolicy.io**](http://editor.networkpolicy.io)
Awesome, thanks for sharing the link!
Thank you!
Thanks for the advice!