5 Best Kubernetes Security Policy Management Tools

Kubernetes prioritizes flexibility over secure defaults. Out of the box, it exposes a broad configuration surface that makes misconfigurations not just possible, but likely. For platform teams operating dozens or hundreds of clusters, relying on manual reviews or ad hoc guardrails doesn't scale and inevitably leads to drift, blind spots, and inconsistent enforcement.

This is where Kubernetes security policy management tools become foundational infrastructure. These systems give platform teams a centralized, declarative way to define security and operational constraints and apply them uniformly across the fleet. Policies become versioned code, enforced automatically at admission time or continuously audited after deployment. Platforms like Plural integrate these controls directly into a GitOps workflow, allowing teams to move security left, eliminate manual intervention, and ensure that every cluster adheres to the same baseline without slowing down application delivery.

Key takeaways:

• Treat security policies as code: Manage security rules within a GitOps workflow to create a version-controlled, auditable, and automated enforcement process. This approach ensures that policies for tools like OPA Gatekeeper are consistently applied across all environments, from testing to production.
• Combine preventative and detective controls: Implement a defense-in-depth strategy by layering preventative measures like admission controllers with detective tools for runtime security. This ensures that while you block misconfigurations at deployment, you can also detect and respond to anomalous activity in running workloads.
• Centralize management for multi-cluster fleets: Use a unified control plane like Plural to manage security tooling and policies across distributed Kubernetes clusters. Plural's GitOps engine and agent-based architecture simplify the deployment of security tools and ensure consistent policy application, eliminating configuration drift and providing a single source of truth for your fleet's security posture.

What Is a Kubernetes Security Policy Management Tool?

A Kubernetes security policy management tool is a platform that standardizes how security and operational rules are defined and enforced across containerized environments. Kubernetes exposes a large configuration surface, and its defaults favor flexibility over safety. At scale, this creates systemic risk: inconsistent configurations, environment drift, and security gaps that are difficult to detect manually.

Policy management tools address this by centralizing policy definition and enforcement across one or many clusters. Policies are expressed declaratively, versioned, and evaluated automatically, turning security into code rather than process. Instead of relying on best-effort reviews, platform teams can enforce guardrails consistently and continuously. Platforms like Plural integrate policy management into a GitOps workflow, making security controls repeatable, auditable, and scalable across the entire fleet.

Why Security Policies Matter for Containerized Applications

Kubernetes security is fundamentally about reducing the blast radius of mistakes. Containerized systems are composed of many moving parts—images, permissions, networking rules, and runtime settings—and a single weak link can expose the entire cluster.

Without enforced policies, teams may unknowingly deploy vulnerable base images, over-permissioned service accounts, or workloads running as root. These are not edge cases; they are common failure modes in fast-moving engineering organizations. Security policies act as automated guardrails, defining what configurations are allowed and blocking everything else. By codifying best practices—such as restricting image sources or enforcing least-privilege access—policies reduce reliance on human judgment and eliminate entire classes of configuration errors.

How Policy Enforcement Secures Kubernetes

Policy enforcement is where intent becomes reality. Most Kubernetes policy engines integrate directly with the Kubernetes API server as admission controllers, intercepting requests before resources are created or modified. This allows policies to be evaluated proactively, rather than detecting issues after workloads are already running.

While native features like NetworkPolicy handle specific concerns such as pod-to-pod traffic, dedicated policy engines offer far broader and more expressive controls. Tools like OPA Gatekeeper can enforce custom rules around image provenance, required labels, resource limits, or security contexts. Invalid configurations are rejected at deploy time, ensuring that insecure workloads never enter the cluster. Platforms like Plural simplify this model by managing the lifecycle and configuration of policy engines across all clusters, giving platform teams consistent enforcement without operational overhead.

Key Features of an Effective Security Policy Tool

When evaluating Kubernetes security tooling, scanning alone is insufficient. A production-grade solution provides layered controls across the application lifecycle and is designed to operate at fleet scale. The most effective platforms let platform teams define intent once and enforce it everywhere—consistently, automatically, and audibly. The following capabilities are table stakes for any serious Kubernetes security policy management tool.

Policy Creation and Enforcement

Policy definition and enforcement form the core of Kubernetes security. An effective tool allows you to express fine-grained constraints on workloads—such as blocking privileged containers, enforcing resource limits, or requiring specific labels—using a policy-as-code model.

Policies should be declarative, version-controlled, and applied automatically. Plural integrates with OPA Gatekeeper to enforce policies at admission time as part of a GitOps workflow. This enables teams to review policy changes like application code, roll them out safely across environments, and ensure consistent enforcement across all clusters without manual intervention.

Runtime Monitoring and Threat Detection

Admission control prevents bad configurations from entering the cluster, but it does not address runtime threats. Once workloads are running, you need continuous visibility into container behavior to detect active compromise or misuse.

Effective tools integrate with runtime security engines that monitor system calls, process execution, and network activity to identify anomalies. Plural provides a centralized control plane for observing cluster health and resource state, and it can aggregate signals from runtime security tools into a single operational view. This allows platform teams to correlate alerts across clusters and respond quickly to real threats rather than isolated events.

Compliance Auditing and Reporting

For teams operating under regulatory or contractual requirements, compliance must be provable—not assumed. A strong security policy platform automates compliance checks and produces audit-ready evidence without manual data collection.

Plural includes comprehensive audit logging for all user actions and API operations performed through the platform. When combined with enforced policy data, this creates a verifiable trail showing not just what rules exist, but that they are actively enforced. This significantly reduces the operational burden of audits while improving confidence in your security posture.

Image Scanning and Vulnerability Assessment

Many Kubernetes security incidents originate before deployment, through vulnerable base images or unpatched dependencies. An effective platform integrates vulnerability scanning directly into CI/CD pipelines and the running cluster.

Plural simplifies this by enabling deployment of tools like Trivy as Kubernetes operators. This provides continuous vulnerability assessment of running workloads, not just pre-build scans. The result is ongoing visibility into CVEs and misconfigurations as your applications evolve, without bolting on separate tooling or workflows.

How to Integrate Security Tools into Your Workflow

Effective Kubernetes security is not about adding standalone tools or manual approval steps. It is about embedding security controls directly into existing development and operational workflows so enforcement happens automatically. When security is integrated end to end—from code commit to production—policies are applied consistently, human error is reduced, and teams maintain velocity without trading off safety. The objective is to make the secure path the default path.

Integrating with GitOps and Policy-as-Code

Policy-as-Code (PaC) applies Infrastructure-as-Code principles to security and compliance rules. Policies are defined declaratively, stored in version control, and evaluated automatically. When combined with a GitOps workflow, Git becomes the single source of truth for both application configuration and security policy.

Each policy change flows through pull requests, reviews, and approvals, creating a clear audit trail and eliminating out-of-band configuration. Plural’s continuous deployment engine is built around this model, allowing teams to manage policies for tools like OPA Gatekeeper in dedicated repositories and automatically synchronize them across all clusters. This ensures policy enforcement is consistent, repeatable, and observable at scale.

Integrating with Your CI/CD Pipeline

Embedding security into CI/CD pipelines enables teams to shift left by catching issues before they reach a cluster. Common controls include scanning container images for known vulnerabilities, validating Kubernetes manifests against policy rules, and blocking non-compliant builds early in the lifecycle.

Plural extends this approach beyond application delivery with its Stacks feature for Infrastructure-as-Code. By tracking repositories built with tools like Terraform, Plural can automatically run plans on pull requests, execute validation steps, and surface results directly as PR comments. This provides fast, actionable feedback while keeping security checks aligned with existing developer workflows.

Integrating with RBAC and Identity Management

Access control failures are a frequent source of Kubernetes security incidents. A robust strategy requires centralized identity management and strict enforcement of least privilege. Integrating clusters with a corporate identity provider using OpenID Connect for Single Sign-On is a foundational step.

Plural simplifies this by providing a built-in Kubernetes dashboard that relies on Kubernetes Impersonation. Users authenticate through an existing OIDC provider, and all access resolves to standard Kubernetes RBAC objects such as ClusterRoleBindings, managed through GitOps. This approach centralizes identity, makes permissions auditable, and removes the need for shared credentials or ad hoc access management across clusters.

Common Challenges in Managing Kubernetes Security

Managing Kubernetes security is a cross-cutting problem that spans configuration, deployment, access control, and runtime operations. Kubernetes’ flexibility is a strength, but without deliberate controls it also creates opportunities for drift, over-permissioning, and inconsistent enforcement. As cluster count and application density increase, these issues compound quickly.

Effective security management is not achieved by deploying a single tool. It requires a coherent strategy that embeds security into day-to-day operational workflows: policy enforcement, identity management, vulnerability scanning, and auditing. Without a centralized control plane, platform teams struggle to maintain a consistent security posture while preserving developer velocity. This is where a unified platform like Plural becomes critical, providing shared visibility and control across the entire fleet.

Navigating Multi-Cloud Complexity

Running Kubernetes across multiple clouds or hybrid environments significantly increases the security surface area. Each provider introduces different identity models, networking primitives, and security defaults, making uniform enforcement difficult. In practice, teams end up managing separate configurations and dashboards, which increases cognitive load and the likelihood of gaps.

Plural is designed to address this problem directly. Its agent-based, egress-only architecture allows clusters in different clouds or private networks to be managed securely from a single control plane. There is no need to expose cluster endpoints or maintain complex VPN topologies. This model enables consistent policy enforcement and fleet-wide visibility regardless of where clusters are running.

Avoiding RBAC and Configuration Missteps

Kubernetes Role-Based Access Control is powerful but easy to misuse. Overly permissive ClusterRoles, copied bindings, and environment-specific drift are common failure modes, especially when RBAC is managed manually at scale. These misconfigurations can silently grant broad access to sensitive resources.

Plural simplifies access control by integrating with existing identity providers using OpenID Connect. Its embedded Kubernetes dashboard relies on Kubernetes impersonation, so all authorization decisions resolve to a user’s console identity and group membership. RBAC policies are defined using standard Kubernetes resources and managed through GitOps, making permissions consistent, auditable, and repeatable across all clusters.

Managing Vulnerabilities and Secrets

Container images are a frequent entry point for vulnerabilities. Outdated packages, unpatched dependencies, and insecure base images can propagate risk across every workload that depends on them. At the same time, Kubernetes’ native secrets mechanism is intentionally minimal and often insufficient for production-grade security requirements.

Plural enables teams to standardize vulnerability management by deploying tools like Trivy as operators across the fleet. This provides continuous scanning of running workloads rather than one-time checks at build time. For secrets, Plural’s GitOps workflow makes it straightforward to deploy and manage external systems such as HashiCorp Vault, ensuring credentials are handled consistently and securely across environments.

Simplifying Monitoring and Auditing

Security monitoring and auditing become exponentially harder as cluster count grows. Signals are distributed, logs are fragmented, and correlating events across environments is non-trivial. Without a centralized view, detecting real threats or producing audit evidence turns into a manual, error-prone process.

Plural provides a single operational view of the entire Kubernetes fleet, exposing cluster health, resource state, and policy enforcement status in one place. The platform also maintains comprehensive audit logs of all actions performed through its console and APIs. This centralized visibility simplifies compliance reporting and allows security and platform teams to detect, investigate, and respond to issues consistently across all clusters.

A Look at Top Kubernetes Security Policy Tools

The right tool for managing Kubernetes security policies depends on your specific needs, from pre-deployment checks to runtime enforcement. The landscape includes open-source projects, cloud-native standards, and comprehensive commercial platforms, each offering a different approach to defining and enforcing rules. Choosing the correct mix of tools is critical for building a defense-in-depth strategy. For instance, an admission controller like OPA Gatekeeper is essential for enforcing preventative controls, ensuring that only compliant resources are admitted into the cluster. This is your first line of defense against misconfigurations.

However, preventative controls aren't enough. You also need runtime security to detect threats that might bypass initial checks or emerge from within already-running workloads. This is where a tool like Falco comes in, monitoring system behavior for suspicious activity. Additionally, proactive scanning tools such as Kubescape and Kubeaudit are vital for continuous auditing, helping you identify vulnerabilities in your manifests and cluster states before they can be exploited. For teams seeking an all-in-one solution, commercial platforms like Sysdig and Aqua provide integrated security suites that cover the entire application lifecycle. Here, we examine several leading tools, including how Plural integrates policy management into its fleet management platform alongside these popular solutions.

How Plural Manages Security Policies

Plural provides a streamlined approach to managing Kubernetes security policies, allowing teams to define, enforce, and audit security configurations across their clusters efficiently. By leveraging a GitOps workflow, you can manage policies as code, ensuring that all changes are version-controlled, auditable, and consistently applied. Plural simplifies the deployment of policy engines like OPA Gatekeeper, enabling you to use a GlobalService to sync policy definitions and constraints across your entire fleet from a single Git repository. This centralized management reduces the operational overhead of maintaining compliance and security standards, especially in large, multi-cluster environments. Plural's architecture ensures that these policies are applied consistently, helping you maintain a strong security posture without manual intervention on each cluster.

Open Policy Agent (OPA) Gatekeeper

Open Policy Agent (OPA) Gatekeeper is a widely adopted admission controller for Kubernetes that enforces policies on objects during create, update, and delete operations. It uses the Rego policy language to define custom rules, giving you fine-grained control over your cluster's configuration. Gatekeeper extends OPA with Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), allowing you to declare ConstraintTemplates for reusable policy logic and Constraints to apply that logic to specific resources. For example, you can enforce policies that require all images to come from a trusted registry or ensure all pods have resource limits defined. As one of the most powerful open-source Kubernetes security tools, Gatekeeper is essential for preventing misconfigurations before they reach production.

Falco for Runtime Security

While OPA Gatekeeper focuses on admission control, Falco provides runtime security by detecting anomalous activity within your running containers. As a CNCF project, Falco acts as a threat detection engine, observing your applications and infrastructure for unexpected behavior. It works by instrumenting the Linux kernel to capture system calls and comparing them against a configurable set of rules. If a container initiates an unexpected network connection, reads a sensitive file, or spawns a shell, Falco can generate an alert. This makes it an effective tool for identifying potential security incidents in real-time, offering a critical layer of defense for workloads that are already deployed. Falco is a key component for runtime security monitoring in modern Kubernetes environments.

Kubescape and Kubeaudit

Kubescape and Kubeaudit are open-source tools focused on risk analysis, scanning your Kubernetes clusters and YAML files for security issues and misconfigurations. They check your configurations against established security frameworks, such as the NSA and CISA Kubernetes Hardening Guide, providing a prioritized list of remediation steps. Unlike runtime tools, Kubescape and Kubeaudit are used for proactive auditing, helping you identify vulnerabilities before deployment or assess the security posture of existing clusters. You can integrate them into your CI/CD pipeline to scan manifests on every commit, preventing insecure configurations from ever reaching production. These tools are essential for maintaining compliance and checking against security best practices throughout the development lifecycle.

Sysdig Secure and Aqua Security

For teams seeking a comprehensive, enterprise-grade solution, platforms like Sysdig Secure and Aqua Security offer a unified approach to cloud-native security. These tools integrate multiple security functions—including image scanning, runtime protection, compliance management, and incident response—into a single platform. They often build upon open-source foundations like Falco (in Sysdig's case) but add advanced features, enterprise support, and a centralized dashboard for managing security across the entire application lifecycle. These platforms are designed to provide deep visibility into containerized applications and cloud infrastructure, making them suitable for organizations with complex security and compliance requirements. They represent some of the top Kubernetes security platforms available for securing large-scale deployments.

Understanding Network Policies and Pod Security Standards

Effective security policy management starts with a solid understanding of Kubernetes’ native security primitives. Network Policies and Pod Security Standards define the baseline controls that every secure cluster should enforce. Network policies regulate how workloads communicate, while Pod Security Standards constrain what workloads are allowed to do at runtime. Together, they enable a defense-in-depth model where isolation and least privilege are enforced by default and extended through higher-level policy management tools like Plural.

Enforcing Network Policies and Microsegmentation

By default, Kubernetes networking is flat: any pod can communicate with any other pod. This maximizes flexibility but creates a large blast radius if a workload is compromised. Kubernetes network policies allow platform teams to explicitly define permitted ingress and egress traffic using label selectors and ports, effectively acting as distributed firewalls for pods.

When applied consistently, network policies enable microsegmentation. Application components are isolated so that each service can communicate only with the peers it requires. For example, frontend pods may be allowed to reach backend APIs on a specific port, while all other traffic is denied. This limits lateral movement and significantly reduces the impact of a breach. Policy management platforms like Plural help standardize and enforce these rules across clusters, ensuring microsegmentation is applied uniformly rather than on a best-effort basis.

Implementing Pod Security Standards

Pod Security Standards define a baseline for how pods are allowed to run. They replace the deprecated PodSecurityPolicy mechanism with a simpler, namespace-scoped enforcement model. Kubernetes provides three predefined levels—Privileged, Baseline, and Restricted—that progressively limit access to sensitive host features.

The Restricted standard enforces strong isolation by preventing containers from running as root, disallowing hostPath mounts, and blocking host networking and privileged escalation. Enforcing these standards ensures that workloads adhere to the principle of least privilege and reduces the risk of container escapes or host compromise. At scale, platforms like Plural make it practical to apply and audit Pod Security Standards consistently across all namespaces and clusters.

Using Custom Admission Controllers for Policy Validation

Native controls provide a strong foundation, but most organizations require additional, context-specific rules. Admission controllers enable this by intercepting requests to the Kubernetes API server before resources are created or modified.

Validating admission controllers such as OPA Gatekeeper allow teams to express complex policies declaratively. These can enforce requirements like approved image registries, mandatory labels, or standardized resource limits. Plural simplifies the operational burden by managing the deployment and configuration of admission controllers fleet-wide, allowing platform teams to enforce custom security policies consistently without maintaining bespoke tooling per cluster.

Best Practices for Implementing Kubernetes Security Policies

Effective Kubernetes security is an ongoing discipline, not a one-time configuration step. As clusters, workloads, and teams evolve, security controls must adapt without slowing delivery. The objective is to build a security posture that is resilient, scalable, and deeply integrated into day-to-day operations. The following best practices focus on layered defenses, treating policies as code, automating enforcement, and maintaining continuous visibility.

Adopt a Defense-in-Depth Strategy

No single control can secure a Kubernetes environment. Defense in depth relies on multiple, independent layers of protection so that failures in one area do not compromise the entire system. In practice, this means combining network isolation, identity and access controls, admission-time validation, and continuous vulnerability scanning.

Plural supports this model by acting as a control plane for deploying and managing complementary security tools. For example, you can enforce admission policies with OPA Gatekeeper, scan workloads for vulnerabilities with Trivy, and apply consistent RBAC and network policies across all clusters. Managed together, these layers reduce blast radius and improve overall resilience.

Define a Policy Development and Testing Lifecycle

Security policies should be treated with the same rigor as application code. Ad hoc changes applied directly to production clusters often lead to outages or unintended access restrictions. Instead, policies should follow a clear development lifecycle with testing, review, and promotion stages.

A GitOps-based workflow is particularly effective for this. Policies are defined declaratively in Git, reviewed through pull requests, and applied automatically to non-production environments before reaching production. This approach ensures every change is auditable, reversible, and consistently applied. Plural’s GitOps-native deployment model makes it straightforward to manage this lifecycle for security policies alongside application and infrastructure changes.

Automate Compliance Checks and Monitoring

Manual compliance verification does not scale in a dynamic Kubernetes environment. Automation is essential for continuously validating that clusters adhere to internal standards and external regulatory requirements.

Effective platforms continuously evaluate policy compliance, surface violations in real time, and maintain audit logs that show not only which rules exist but that they are actively enforced. Plural centralizes this information in a multi-cluster dashboard, allowing platform teams to monitor compliance posture across the entire fleet and remediate issues quickly without interrupting developer workflows.

Schedule Regular Updates and Vulnerability Scans

Kubernetes security degrades over time if environments are not actively maintained. New vulnerabilities are discovered daily in operating systems, runtimes, and application dependencies. In parallel, misconfigurations—particularly around RBAC—can quietly accumulate and expose sensitive resources.

Regular updates to clusters, controllers, and node components should be combined with scheduled vulnerability scans of container images and running workloads. Automating these scans ensures risks are identified early, while periodic configuration reviews help catch drift before it becomes exploitable. Plural reduces the operational burden of this work by simplifying cluster upgrades and standardizing how security scanners and controllers are deployed and updated across the fleet.

How to Choose the Right Security Policy Management Tool

Selecting the right security policy tool for Kubernetes is a critical decision that extends beyond just checking feature boxes. The right tool should align with your operational workflows, scale with your infrastructure, and provide clear, actionable security insights without creating bottlenecks for your development teams. A strategic choice here strengthens your security posture and improves efficiency across your entire application lifecycle. The following criteria will help you evaluate potential tools and find the one that best fits your organization's specific needs.

Define Your Evaluation Criteria

Your evaluation should begin with a clear set of requirements tailored to your environment. A comprehensive tool should cover the entire application lifecycle, from code to cloud. Start by assessing its policy management capabilities. How intuitive is it to create, test, and enforce policies? Does it support a policy-as-code approach, allowing you to version control your security rules alongside your application code?

Next, consider its monitoring and threat detection features. The tool must be able to identify misconfigurations and detect anomalous behavior in real time. Equally important is its ability to assist with compliance and auditing. Look for tools that can generate reports for standards like SOC 2 or HIPAA. Finally, evaluate whether an open-source solution or a commercial platform is a better fit. While open-source tools offer flexibility, a platform like Plural can simplify the management of tools like OPA Gatekeeper and provide a unified view of your security posture from a single-pane-of-glass console.

Assess Integration and Scalability Needs

A security tool is only effective if it integrates seamlessly into your existing ecosystem. Evaluate how well it connects with your CI/CD pipeline, container registries, and identity providers. For example, a tool should be able to scan container images for vulnerabilities before they are deployed and enforce policies based on developer identity. Plural’s dashboard integrates directly with your OIDC provider, allowing you to manage RBAC using the same user and group identities your organization already uses.

Scalability is another critical factor, especially for growing organizations managing multiple clusters. The tool must handle an increasing number of workloads and policies without degrading performance. Plural’s agent-based architecture is designed for this exact scenario, ensuring that you can manage security policies consistently across a large fleet of clusters without creating performance bottlenecks or complex networking configurations. This allows you to maintain security and visibility even in highly distributed, multi-cloud, or on-prem environments.

Plan Your Implementation and Budget

Before committing to a full-scale rollout, always conduct a proof of concept (PoC) in a non-production environment. A PoC allows you to validate the tool’s functionality, test its integrations, and assess its performance under realistic conditions. This step helps you identify potential challenges early and ensures the tool meets your technical requirements without disrupting development workflows.

When considering the budget, look beyond the initial licensing cost. Factor in the total cost of ownership, which includes implementation effort, training for your team, and ongoing operational overhead. A tool that is complex to deploy and manage can quickly consume valuable engineering resources. Plural helps reduce this burden by simplifying the deployment and lifecycle management of essential security tools. Using features like the Plural Service Catalog, you can provision and configure security components like OPA Gatekeeper with just a few clicks, significantly reducing implementation time and operational complexity.

Related Articles

• Kubernetes Cluster Security: A Deep Dive
• Kubernetes Network Policies: Everything You Need to Know

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between OPA Gatekeeper and native Pod Security Standards? Pod Security Standards (PSS) provide a built-in, foundational layer of security by defining three default levels of pod restrictions—Privileged, Baseline, and Restricted. They are excellent for establishing a baseline security posture at the namespace level. OPA Gatekeeper, on the other hand, is a custom admission controller that offers far more granular control. It allows you to write and enforce your own specific rules using the Rego policy language, such as requiring specific labels on all deployments or blocking images from unapproved registries. You can think of PSS as the essential guardrails, while Gatekeeper lets you build a security framework tailored to your organization's unique requirements.

How does Plural simplify managing security policies across many clusters? Plural addresses the operational challenge of applying policies consistently at scale. Instead of manually configuring each cluster, you can manage your security policies for tools like OPA Gatekeeper in a single Git repository. Plural's GitOps engine then automatically syncs these policies across your entire fleet of clusters. This ensures every environment, from development to production, adheres to the same security standards. This approach also provides a clear audit trail for compliance, since every policy change is a version-controlled commit that can be reviewed and tracked.

Is it better to focus on admission control or runtime security? This isn't an either/or situation; a strong security strategy requires both. Admission control, using tools like OPA Gatekeeper, is a proactive measure that prevents insecure or non-compliant configurations from ever being deployed into your cluster. Runtime security, with tools like Falco, is a reactive measure that monitors running workloads for suspicious activity that might indicate an active threat. A comprehensive strategy uses admission control to secure your deployments by default and runtime security to detect and respond to any threats that might emerge.

My team is new to policy-as-code. What's the best way to start? The most effective way to begin is by starting small with a few high-impact policies. Identify a common misconfiguration in your environment, such as containers running as root or deployments that lack resource limits, and write a simple policy to address it. Most policy engines offer an "audit" or "dry run" mode, which allows you to see what resources would violate the policy without actually blocking them. This gives your team a safe way to understand a policy's impact and refine it before moving to full enforcement.

Why can't I just use my existing network firewall to secure my Kubernetes clusters? Traditional firewalls operate at the network perimeter and are designed for static infrastructure based on IP addresses. Kubernetes networking is highly dynamic, with pods being created and destroyed constantly, each with a new internal IP address. A traditional firewall is blind to the traffic flowing between pods inside the cluster. To secure this internal traffic, you need Kubernetes-native constructs like Network Policies, which create microsegmentation rules based on labels rather than IPs, effectively acting as a firewall within your cluster.