Secure Kubernetes Workload Deployment with Automated Enforcement of Cluster-Defined Policies

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Scheduling pods on separate physical nodes is a crucial strategy to isolate workloads with incompatible security requirements. In Kubernetes, this is enforced using metadata such as node selectors, affinity rules, and topology spread constraints, all manually defined by developers at resource creation. The aforementioned process is complex and prone to errors, frequently resulting in misconfigurations that expose systems to data breaches and regulatory violations.

This paper proposes an approach to constrain scheduling using policies defined once at the cluster level and automatically evaluated by Kubernetes during each workload deployment. The advantages are (i) automatic rejection of uncompliant resource creation requests, (ii) streamlined support for executing multi-tenant workloads, and (iii) secure scheduling and deployment of workloads based on security requirements. To implement this solution, we integrate the native Kubernetes node-filtering capabilities with OPA Gatekeeper for policy enforcement. We demonstrate how this approach reliably enforces common corporate governance policies and analyze its performance advantage over isolation achieved solely through sandboxing. The experimental evaluation confirms the effectiveness of our proposal and the minimal overhead.

@inproceedings{secure-scheduling,
    author = {Matthew Rossi and Michele Beretta and Dario Facchinetti and
              Stefano Paraboschi},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 16th IEEE International
                 Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and
                 Science (CLOUDCOM)},
    title = {Secure Kubernetes Workload Deployment with Automated
             Enforcement of Cluster-Defined Policies},
    day = {14-16},
    month = {November},
    year = {2025},
    location = {Shenzhen, China},
}