April 6, 2021 By Lucas Palm 2 min read

Cluster image security enforcement is a new feature available today in our IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud offerings. 

Enabling image security enforcement in your cluster will provide you an easy way to ensure that the images running in your cluster meet specific security requirements set and controlled by you.

With image security enabled in your cluster, you can control where images are deployed from, enforce Vulnerability Advisor policies, ensure that content trust is properly applied to an image and more.

If an image does not meet your policy requirements, the pod is not deployed to your cluster or updated.

When you enable the image security feature in your cluster, you are getting a fully managed version of the open source Portieris project dedicated solely to your cluster.  This means that Portieris will receive the same high-availability benefits as your cluster masters do today. So, once enabled and configured to your liking, you can sit back and relax, knowing your cluster is protected at all times from undesirable images.

Availability

This feature is generally available today for the following cluster versions:

  • Kubernetes 1.18+
  • OpenShift 4.5+

Clusters at older versions will first need to upgrade to a supported version before you can enable image security.

Ready to get started?

Assuming your cluster is at a supported version level, enabling image security enforcement can be done in one easy step from the CLI or console. The installation documentation will walk you through this simple process.  

Once enabled, the next step would be to start creating image policies to control what images are allowed to run in your cluster. Image security policies define Portieris’ behavior in your cluster. You must configure your own policies in order for Portieris to enforce your required security posture.  

As an “out-of-the-box” bonus, the IBM-owned images we deploy into your cluster will already have the proper security enforcement applied to them, so all that is left for you to do is configure how you want your own images to behave.

Learn more about the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud offerings.

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