Introduction 

Organizations are increasingly adopting Kubernetes, and efficiently segregating resources, managing privileges, and ensuring isolation between teams or projects becomes critical. Multi-tenancy offers a solution by enabling multiple teams to share a single Kubernetes cluster, with each team or project receiving a dedicated namespace. This setup ensures resource separation and minimizes interference, optimizing overall utilization.

A Kubernetes namespace provides logical boundaries for resources such as Pods, Services, and Secrets. This isolation prevents users from accessing resources outside their assigned namespace.

Adopting namespace as a service provides lots of benefits for platform teams:

• Cost Efficiency: Shared infrastructure reduces overhead costs. By efficiently segregating resources, multiple clusters are unnecessary, which can be expensive to maintain.
• Enhanced Security: Each namespace acts as an isolated unit, ensuring that potential breaches remain contained.
• Scalability: As your organization grows, so do the number of teams and projects. Namespaces can quickly scale to accommodate more tenants without significant reconfiguration.

Why  Namespace-as-a-service?

Namespaces divide Kubernetes clusters into logical shares that can be used by and isolated from different teams or projects. Streamlining the process of providing developers with self-service access has significant benefits:

• Lowering the cloud and K8s cost 
• Increases developers velocity 
• Simplify cluster management

How it works

Overview

“Namespace as a service” refers to a model where namespaces are dynamically created, managed, and decommissioned based on tenant requirements. In this approach, platform teams automate namespace provisioning, policy enforcement, permissions, and resource quotas, streamlining the user experience and enhancing operational efficiency for developers, data scientists, and other users.

Most organizations’ most significant problems are delays in cross-team collaboration and different teams handling the various parts of the infrastructure. Baking everything into a platform and providing self-service will significantly reduce the time spent collaborating with multiple stakeholders.   

Technical Deep Dive

The solution leverages ArgoCD and Kyverno policies to generate the ArgoCD application sets.

ArgoCD is an open-source, declarative GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes applications. It automatically deploys and synchronizes your applications based on the manifests in a Git repository, ensuring the live state matches the defined state. It’s instrumental in multi-tenant Kubernetes environments.

 ArgoCD ApplicationSets are a feature in Argo CD that allows you to manage multiple applications across different clusters as a single unit. They simultaneously use a templating mechanism to create or modify various Argo CD applications, targeting numerous destinations. This feature simplifies management and is particularly useful for large numbers of applications and clusters.

Developer Workflow

Architecture

A step-by-step guide for setting up locally is present in the GitHub repository. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, embracing “Namespace-as-a-Service” in Kubernetes environments offers numerous advantages for organizations. By effectively segregating resources and providing dedicated namespaces for different teams or projects, multi-tenancy optimizes resource utilization and enhances security and scalability. Automating namespace provisioning, policy enforcement, and permissions through tools like ArgoCD and Kyverno further streamlines the user experience and operational efficiency for developers and other users. Overall, adopting “Namespace-as-a-Service” represents a critical step towards achieving cost efficiency, enhanced security, and improved collaboration in multi-tenant Kubernetes environments.

For more information, visit https://nirmata.com/ or request a demo today to see how Nirmata Control Hub can transform your security operations.