Polaris helps keep your cluster healthy. It runs a variety of checks to ensure that Kubernetes deployments are configured using best practices, helping you avoid problems in the future. Polaris can be run in a few different modes:

• A dashboard that provides an overview of how well current deployments are configured within a cluster.
• An experimental validating webhook that can prevent any future deployments that do not live up to a configured standard.
• A command-line audit that can be incorporated into your CI/CD pipeline

Want to learn more? ReactiveOps holds office hours on Zoom the first Friday of every month, at 12pm Eastern. You can also reach out via email at opensource@reactiveops.com

Quickstart

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/reactiveops/polaris/releases/latest/download/dashboard.yaml
kubectl port-forward --namespace polaris svc/polaris-dashboard 8080:80

With the port forwarding in place, you can open http://localhost:8080 in your browser to view the dashboard.

Dashboard

The Polaris dashboard is a way to get a simple visual overview of the current state of your Kubernetes deployments as well as a roadmap for what can be improved. The dashboard provides a cluster wide overview as well as breaking out results by category, namespace, and deployment.

Our default standards in Polaris are rather high, so don’t be surprised if your score is lower than you might expect. A key goal for Polaris was to set a high standard and aim for great configuration by default. If the defaults we’ve included are too strict, it’s easy to adjust the configuration as part of the deployment configuration to better suit your workloads.

Webhook

Polaris includes experimental support for an optional validating webhook. This accepts the same configuration as the dashboard, and can run the same validations. This webhook will reject any deployments that trigger a validation error. This is indicative of the greater goal of Polaris, not just to encourage better configuration through dashboard visibility, but to actually enforce it with this webhook. Although we are working towards greater stability and better test coverage, we do not currently consider this webhook component production ready.

Unfortunately we have not found a way to display warnings as part of kubectl output unless we are rejecting a deployment altogether. That means that any checks with a severity of warning will still pass webhook validation, and the only evidence of that warning will either be in the Polaris dashboard or the Polaris webhook logs.

Installation and Usage

Polaris can be installed on your cluster using kubectl or Helm. It can also be run as a local binary, which will use your kubeconfig to connect to the cluster or run against local YAML files.

kubectl

Dashboard

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/reactiveops/polaris/releases/latest/download/dashboard.yaml
kubectl port-forward --namespace polaris svc/polaris-dashboard 8080:80

Webhook

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/reactiveops/polaris/releases/latest/download/webhook.yaml

Helm

Start by adding the ReactiveOps Helm repo:

helm repo add reactiveops-stable https://charts.reactiveops.com/stable

Dashboard

helm upgrade --install polaris reactiveops-stable/polaris --namespace polaris
kubectl port-forward --namespace polaris svc/polaris-dashboard 8080:80

Webhook

helm upgrade --install polaris reactiveops-stable/polaris --namespace polaris \
  --set webhook.enable=true --set dashboard.enable=false

Local Binary

Installation

Binary releases are available on the releases page or can be installed with Homebrew:

brew tap reactiveops/tap
brew install reactiveops/tap/polaris
polaris --version

You can run polaris --help to see a full list of options.

Dashboard

The dashboard can be run on your local machine, without installing anything on the cluster. Polaris will use your local kubeconfig to connect to the cluster.

polaris --dashboard --dashboard-port 8080

Audits

You can also run audits on the command line and see the output as JSON, YAML, or a raw score:

polaris --audit --output-format yaml > report.yaml
polaris --audit --output-format score
# 92

Both the dashboard and audits can run against a local directory or YAML file rather than a cluster:

polaris --audit --audit-path ./deploy/

Running with CI/CD

You can integrate Polaris into CI/CD for repositories containing infrastructure-as-code. For example, to fail if polaris detects any error-level issues, or if the score drops below 90%:

polaris --audit --audit-path ./deploy/ \
  --set-exit-code-on-error \
  --set-exit-code-below-score 90

Configuration

Polaris supports a wide range of validations covering a number of Kubernetes best practices. Here's a sample configuration file that includes all currently supported checks. The default configuration contains a number of those checks. This repository also includes a sample full configuration file that enables all available checks.

Each check can be assigned a severity. Only checks with a severity of error or warning will be validated. The results of these validations are visible on the dashboard. In the case of the validating webhook, only failures with a severity of error will result in a change being rejected.

Polaris validation checks fall into several different categories:

• Health Checks
• Images
• Networking
• Resources
• Security

CLI Options

• config: Specify a location for the Polaris config
• dashboard: Runs the webserver for Polaris dashboard.
• dashboard-port: Port for the dashboard webserver (default 8080)
• dashboard-base-path: Path on which the dashboard is being served (default /)
• webhook: Runs the webhook webserver.
• webhook-port: Port for the webhook webserver (default 9876)
• disable-webhook-config-installer: disable the installer in the webhook server, so it won't install webhook configuration resources during bootstrapping
• kubeconfig: Paths to a kubeconfig. Only required if out-of-cluster.

Contributing

PRs welcome! Check out the Contributing Guidelines, Code of Conduct, and Roadmap for more information.

Further Information

A history of changes to this project can be viewed in the Changelog

If you'd like to learn more about Polaris, or if you'd like to speak with a Kubernetes expert, you can contact info@reactiveops.com or visit our website

License

Apache License 2.0