The Kubernetes ecosystem, while powerful, is a sprawling landscape of tools. As organizations scale their deployments, ensuring compliance and security becomes paramount. But how do you effectively track and report on your Kubernetes policies and scanners across diverse tools?
Enter OpenReports (https://openreports.io/), a new but incredibly promising project aiming to standardize reporting, drawing inspiration from the success of OpenTelemetry.
OpenReports is designed to capture, correlate, and export evaluation results for any Kubernetes tool, such as policy engines, scanners, or any controller that wishes to produce reports. This is the core vision of OpenReports. The project seeks to provide a unified API and set of tools for producing and consuming reports in a standardized, vendor-neutral format.
The OpenReports API was initially developed by the Kubernetes Policy Working Group and has now been spun out into its own project.
The Challenge: Reporting Fragmentation
Currently, reporting in Kubernetes is a fragmented affair. Each policy engine, scanner, or controller often has its own reporting mechanism, and integration points. This creates significant challenges for:
- Centralized Visibility: Gaining a holistic view of policy compliance across multiple clusters is difficult.
- Correlation and Analysis: Correlating policy violations with other system events is cumbersome.
- Automation and Auditing: Automating compliance reporting and audit trails requires significant custom integration.
OpenReports: A Unified Approach
OpenReports aims to address these challenges by providing:
- Standardized Data Model: A common data model for representing evaluation results, including names, resource details, evaluation status, and relevant metadata.
- Collection and Aggregation: Mechanisms for collecting reports from different engines and aggregating them into a central repository.
- Export and Integration: Standardized export formats (e.g., JSON, Prometheus metrics) and integrations with popular monitoring and logging systems (e.g., Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Grafana).
What OpenReports Provides
The OpenReports project provides a Kubernetes Custom Resource Definition (CRD) and several tools to manage reports:
- OpenReports API: cluster-wide and namespaced resource for reports.
- Web Console: a web UI for viewing reports.
- Reports Routing Service: a service to route reports to various notification targets, like Slack, Teams, ElasticSearch, and several others.
- API Aggregation Service: a service to offload etcd by storing reports in a separate database. This is required for larger or busier clusters where a large amount of reports may be produced.
Report Producers and Consumers
While OpenReports is a new project, the API has been maintained for several years by the Kubernetes Policy Working Group, and several producers and consumers exist. Here is the current list:
Report Producers:
Report Consumers:
Why OpenReports Makes Sense
The comparison to OpenTelemetry is apt. Just as OpenTelemetry standardized observability signals (traces, metrics, logs), OpenReports aims to standardize policy reporting. This brings several key advantages:
- Vendor Neutrality: OpenReports is designed to be vendor-neutral, ensuring interoperability between different policy engines and reporting tools.
- Community-Driven: As a CNCF sandbox project (hopefully – submission is planned once all tools are integrated!), OpenReports will benefit from community contributions and collaboration.
- Scalability and Performance: The project is designed to handle large-scale Kubernetes deployments and high volumes of policy reports.
- Simplified Integration: Standardized formats and integrations simplify the process of integrating policy reporting into existing monitoring and logging workflows.
The Future of Kubernetes Compliance
OpenReports has the potential to revolutionize Kubernetes compliance by providing a unified and standardized approach to policy reporting. By simplifying the process of collecting, analyzing, and reporting on policy and controller evaluations, OpenReports will empower organizations to build more secure and compliant Kubernetes environments.
As the Kubernetes ecosystem continues to evolve, projects like OpenReports are crucial for ensuring that security and compliance remain top priorities. If you are passionate about Kubernetes policy management and reporting, consider contributing to this exciting project. The future of Kubernetes compliance may very well depend on it.
Get Involved:
- Visit the OpenReports website: https://openreports.io/
- Explore the project on GitHub: https://github.com/openreports
- Join the community discussions: https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/C08JH5223A6
Stay tuned for more updates on OpenReports as it progresses towards its goal of standardizing Kubernetes policy reporting.