With 2022 almost over, it’s time to look back at what happened within the Kubewarden project during the last year.

The 1.0 release

A significant milestone for the project in 2022 was the release of Kubewarden v1.0.0 during the month of June.

With this release, the Kubewarden team committed to the stability of all the public interfaces of the project and all its Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions.

Moreover, the project was considered ready to be used in production environments.

CNCF inclusion

Another exciting event took place during the month of June. That’s when Kubewarden’s inclusion in the CNCF sandbox took place.

On top of being a great recognition of the quality and potential of the project, the acceptance into CNCF led to an exciting integration with ArtifactHub. This proved to be a great improvement not just for policy authors, but also for Kubewarden users who can now find all the existing policies on the familiar ArtifactHub interface.

By being part of CNCF, Kubewarden also got access to another CNCF project, CLOMonitor. Thanks to CLOMonitor, Kubewarden’s users have a clear picture of the project health and can assess its development and security practices.

Pod Security Policy replacement

During the month of August, Kubernetes 1.25 release finally removed Pod Security Policies.

This event was planned and advertised for a long time. Due to this, the Kubewarden developers were able to provide tooling, policies, and documentation to smoothen the migration process from Kubernetes Pod Security Policies to Kubewarden policies.

Secure supply chain

The topic of secure supply chain started to emerge near the end of 2021, but it was during this year that many projects and organizations tackled it.

The sigstore project proved to be one of the pillars of these initiatives. Kubewarden invested early in the Sigstore project, with some of our maintainers being active also within the Sigstore community.

During the last year Kubewarden embraced Sigstore to securely distribute its own assets, like container images, policies, helm charts and cli utilities. Moreover, we exposed Sigstore capabilities to our policy authors and provided a ready to use policy that can be used to vet the container images used by Kubernetes workloads.

Sigstore provides different ways to sign artifacts: with traditional keys, keyless mode, keyless mode from a GitHub Action workflow or by using self-signed certificates stored on a physical token or provided by a KMS. During the last year we kept extending Kubewarden to ensure all these scenarios would be available also to our users.

Other notable features

A stream of improvements have been made to the Kubewarden project during the last year.

The Kubernetes integration was further expanded by introducing the new AdmissionPolicy Custom Resource. This allows regular Kubernetes users to define policies that are scoped to a specific Namespace.

Next, we introduced a new operating mode for all our policies: the “monitor” mode. This allows Kubernetes administrators to better understand how a policy would impact their existing clusters once it was enforced.

More recently, the Kubewarden developers simplified the process of deploying Kubewarden inside of air gapped environments. This has been achieved by providing small helpers, writing documentation and, most important of all, dedicated QA efforts.

New policies

During the last months we created many ready-to-use policies. Some of them are:

• Verify image signatures: this policy leverages Sigstore capabilities to ensure only trusted workloads are admitted inside of your clusters
• Environment variables secret scanner: this policy finds secrets, like private keys and API tokens, that are being leaked via environment variables
• Deprecated resources: this policy can be used to prevent the creation of resources that are deprecated by Kubernetes

See you in 2023!

One of the major changes in 2023 will be the introduction of community meetings. The first meeting will be held on January 12th, 2023 at 4 PM UTC.

We look forward to having you join these meetings and interacting with the rest of the Kubewarden community. Not only will you learn about the latest happenings within the project, but you will also be able to share your feedback and Kubewarden stories with everybody else.

In the meantime, on behalf of the Kubewarden project, I’d like to wish all our users a Happy New Year! 🍾 🎆 🎉