Kubewarden 1.9.0 has introduced even more features requested by the community, and we are excited to share them with you!

In this blog post, we will introduce the new Raw policy type.

Kubewarden as a generic policy engine

Raw policies allow policy authors to write and execute policies that are not necessarily related to Kubernetes. This means that Kubewarden can be used as a general-purpose policy engine. For instance, you can use Kubewarden to validate any type of artifact: configurations, Terraform plans, test coverage, static analysis or even deploy Kubewarden alongside your web application to validate domain-specific requests.

Key features

Raw policies offer several key features:

• Simple API: The Policy Server exposes the /validate_raw endpoint, enabling the validation or mutation of arbitrary JSON documents against Kubewarden policies.

• Language Agnostic: Raw policies can be written in any language that supports WebAssembly, such as Go, Rust, and Rego.

• Versatility: Raw policies provide a high degree of flexibility, allowing policy authors to define policies tailored to their specific needs.

• Standalone Execution: The Policy Server can be run outside Kubernetes as a standalone container if needed, which simplifies the deployment and execution of raw policies and the integration with other systems.

Using the validate raw endpoint

Let’s see the /validate_raw endpoint of a local Policy Server running on port 3000 in action:

This request is accepted:

This one is rejected:

This one is accepted but the request is mutated:

Conclusion

If you want to learn more about Raw policies, please check out the how-to.

We are excited to see how the community will use this new feature. What are you going to build with it? We are curious to know!

Please, reach out on Slack or join our monthly community meeting to share your ideas with us.