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Self-managed cluster resources (Preview)

Adding certain cluster-wide resources, such as CustomResourceDefinitions, are cluster-wide settings that are prohibited by Welkin for security purposes. However, many popular applications, in particular ones with Operators, require cluster-wide resources to be installed. This preview feature enables application developers to self-manage a predefined set of such cluster-wide resources. This trade-off means that application developers get the ability to install and manage such popular applications, but without compromising the security posture of the cluster. By enabling this feature, a predefined set of cluster-wide resources is allowed to be installed. In addition to CustomResourceDefinitions, other cluster-wide resources, such as the required ClusterRoles and ServiceAccounts are installed. The list of currently supported applications for self-management is:

  • SealedSecrets
  • MongoDB
  • Flux
  • Kafka

Limitations

Welkin does not allow application developers to install ClusterRoles and ClusterRoleBindings. For pre-approved operators that require ClusterRoles and ClusterRoleBindings. They are installed during enabling of self-managed-CRDs feature. The installation of self-managed cluster resources can be limited to a pre-defined Namespace. For example, Sealed Secrets is required to be installed in the namespace sealed-secrets. This to correctly bind a cluster role to the service account.

Enable self-managed cluster-wide resources

By default, this feature is disabled. To enable it, add the following snippet to the environments wc-config.yaml file

user:
  # Enable Sealed Secrets
  sealedSecrets:
    enabled: true
  # Enable MongoDB
  mongodb:
    enabled: true
  # Enable Flux
  fluxv2:
    enabled: true
  # Enable Kafka
  kafka:
    enabled: true

gatekeeper:
  allowUserCRDs:
    # Enable feature
    enabled: true
    enforcement: deny
    # Add extra allowed CRDs
    extraCRDs: []
    # - names:
    #     - sealedsecrets.bitnami.com
    #   group: "bitnami.com"

    # Add extra service accounts that needs access to CRDs
    extraServiceAccounts: []
    #  - namespace: "gatekeeper-system"
    #    name: "gatekeeper-admin-upgrade-crds"