Policy framework

The policy framework provides governance capabilities to OCM managed Kubernetes clusters. Policies provide visibility and drive remediation for various security and configuration aspects to help IT administrators meet their requirements.

API Concepts

View the Policy API page for additional details about the Policy API managed by the Policy Framework components, including:

• Policy
• PolicySet
• PlacementBinding

Architecture

The governance policy framework distributes policies to managed clusters and collects results to send back to the hub cluster.

• Policy propagator
• Policy framework addon

Prerequisite

You must meet the following prerequisites to install the policy framework:

• Ensure kubectl and kustomize are installed.

• Ensure the open-cluster-management cluster manager is installed. See Start the control plane for more information.

• Ensure the open-cluster-management klusterlet is installed. See Register a cluster for more information.

• If you are using PlacementRules with your policies, ensure the open-cluster-management application is installed . See Application management for more information. If you are using the default Placement API, you can skip the Application management installation, but you do need to install the PlacementRule CRD with this command:

  kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/open-cluster-management-io/multicloud-operators-subscription/main/deploy/hub-common/apps.open-cluster-management.io_placementrules_crd.yaml
  

Install the governance-policy-framework hub components

Install via Clusteradm CLI

Ensure clusteradm CLI is installed and is at least v0.3.0. Download and extract the clusteradm binary. For more details see the clusteradm GitHub page.

1. Deploy the policy framework controllers to the hub cluster:

   # The context name of the clusters in your kubeconfig
   # If the clusters are created by KinD, then the context name will the follow the pattern "kind-<cluster name>".
   export CTX_HUB_CLUSTER=<your hub cluster context>           # export CTX_HUB_CLUSTER=kind-hub
   export CTX_MANAGED_CLUSTER=<your managed cluster context>   # export CTX_MANAGED_CLUSTER=kind-cluster1
   
   # Set the deployment namespace
   export HUB_NAMESPACE="open-cluster-management"
   
   # Deploy the policy framework hub controllers
   clusteradm install hub-addon --names governance-policy-framework --context ${CTX_HUB_CLUSTER}
   

2. Ensure the pods are running on the hub with the following command:

   $ kubectl get pods -n ${HUB_NAMESPACE}
   NAME                                                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
   governance-policy-addon-controller-bc78cbcb4-529c2         1/1     Running   0          94s
   governance-policy-propagator-8c77f7f5f-kthvh               1/1     Running   0          94s
   

   • See more about the governance-policy-framework components:
     • policy-propagator
     • policy-addon-controller

Deploy the synchronization components to the managed cluster(s)

Deploy via Clusteradm CLI

1. To deploy the synchronization components to a self-managed hub cluster:

   clusteradm addon enable --names governance-policy-framework --clusters <managed_hub_cluster_name> --annotate addon.open-cluster-management.io/on-multicluster-hub=true --context ${CTX_HUB_CLUSTER}
   

   To deploy the synchronization components to a managed cluster:

   clusteradm addon enable --names governance-policy-framework --clusters <cluster_name> --context ${CTX_HUB_CLUSTER}
   

2. Verify that the governance-policy-framework-addon controller pod is running on the managed cluster with the following command:

   $ kubectl get pods -n open-cluster-management-agent-addon
   NAME                                                     READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
   governance-policy-framework-addon-57579b7c-652zj         1/1     Running   0          87s
   

What is next

Install the policy controllers to the managed clusters.