popeye

Popeye - A Kubernetes Cluster Sanitizer

Popeye is a utility that cruises Kubernetes cluster resources and reports potential issues with your deployment manifests and configurations. By scanning your clusters, it detects misconfigurations and ensure best practices are in place thus preventing potential future headaches. It aims at reducing the cognitive overload one faces when managing and operating a Kubernetes cluster in the wild. Popeye is a readonly tool, it does not change or update any of your Kubernetes resources or configurations in any way!

Installation

Popeye is available on Linux, OSX and Windows platforms.

• Binaries for Linux, Windows and Mac are available as tarballs in the release page or via the SnapCraft link above.

• For OSX using Homebrew

  brew tap derailed/popeye && brew install popeye
  

• Building from source Popeye was built using go 1.12+. In order to build Popeye from source you must:

  1. Clone the repo

  2. Set env var GO111MODULE=on

  3. Add the following command in your go.mod file

     replace (
       github.com/derailed/popeye => MY_POPEYE_CLONED_GIT_REPO
     )
     

  4. Build and run the executable

     go run main.go
     

Sanitizers

Popeye scans your cluster for best practices and potential issues. Currently, Popeye only looks at nodes, namespaces, pods and services. More will come soon! We are hoping Kubernetes friends will pitch'in to make Popeye even better.

The aim of the sanitizers is to pick up on misconfigurations ie things like ports mismatch, dead or unused resources, metrics utilization, probes, container images, RBAC rules, naked resources, etc...

Popeye is not another static analysis tool. It runs and inspect Kubernetes resources on live clusters and sanitize resources as they are in the wild!

Here is a list of sanitizers in place for the current release.

The Command Line

You can use Popeye standalone or using a spinach yaml config to tune the sanitizer. Details about the Popeye configuration file are below.

# Dump version info
popeye version
# Popeye a cluster using your current kubeconfig environment.
popeye
# Popeye uses a spinach config file of course! aka spinachyaml!
popeye -f spinach.yml
# Popeye a cluster using a kubeconfig context.
popeye --context olive
# Stuck?
popeye help

Popeye In Cluster...

Alternatively, Popeye can be run directly on your Kubernetes clusters as a single shot or cronjob.

Here is a sample setup, please modify per your needs/wants. The manifests for this are in the k8s directory in this repo.

kubectl apply -f k8s/popeye/ns.yml && kubectl apply -f k8s/popeye

---
apiVersion: batch/v1beta1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name:      popeye
  namespace: popeye
spec:
  schedule: "* */1 * * *" # Fireoff Popeye once an hour
  concurrencyPolicy: Forbid
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          serviceAccountName: popeye
          restartPolicy: Never
          containers:
            - name: popeye
              image: derailed/popeye:v0.3.0
              imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
              args:
                - -o
                - yaml
              resources:
                limits:
                  cpu:    500m
                  memory: 100Mi

Popeye got your RBAC!

In order for Popeye to do his work, the signed in user must have enough RBAC oomph to get/list the resources mentioned above as well as metrics-server get/list access.

Sample Popeye RBAC Rules (Subject to change!!)

---
# Popeye ServiceAccount.
apiVersion: v1
kind:       ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name:      popeye
  namespace: popeye

# Popeye needs get/list access on the following Kubernetes resources.
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind:       ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: popeye
rules:
- apiGroups: [""]
  resources:
   - configmaps
   - deployments
   - endpoints
   - horizontalpodautoscalers
   - namespaces
   - nodes
   - persistentvolumes
   - persistentvolumeclaims
   - pods
   - secrets
   - serviceaccounts
   - services
   - statefulsets
  verbs:     ["get", "list"]
- apiGroups: ["rbac.authorization.k8s.io"]
  resources:
  - clusterroles
  - clusterrolebindings
  - roles
  - rolebindings
  verbs:     ["get", "list"]
- apiGroups: ["metrics.k8s.io"]
  resources:
  - pods
  - nodes
  verbs:     ["get", "list"]

---
# Binds Popeye to this ClusterRole.
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind:       ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
  name: popeye
subjects:
- kind:     ServiceAccount
  name:     popeye
  namespace: popeye
roleRef:
  kind:     ClusterRole
  name:     popeye
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io

Screenshots

Cluster D Score

Cluster A Score

The SpinachYAML Configuration

NOTE: This file will change as Popeye matures!

# A Popeye sample configuration file
popeye:
  # Checks allocations and trip report based on over or under allocations for CPU and Memory.
  allocations:
    cpu:
      over: 100
      under: 50
    memory:
      over: 100
      under: 50

  # Configure node resources.
  node:
    # Limits set a cpu/mem threshold in % ie if cpu|mem > limit a lint warning is triggered.
    limits:
      # CPU checks if current CPU utilization on a node is greater than 90%.
      cpu:    90
      # Memory checks if current Memory utilization on a node is greater than 80%.
      memory: 80
    # Exclude lists node names to exclude from the scan.
    exclude:
    - master

  # Configure namespace resources
  namespace:
    # Exclude list out namespaces to be excluded from the scan.
    exclude:
      - kube-system
      - kube-public

  # Configure pod resources
  pod:
    # Restarts check the restarts count and triggers a lint warning if above threshold.
    restarts:
      3
    # Check container resource utilization in percent.
    # Issues a lint warning if about these threshold.
    limits:
      cpu:    80
      memory: 75

  # Service ...
  service:
    # Excludes these services from the scan.
    exclude:
      - default/kubernetes
      - blee-ns/fred

Report Morphology

The sanitizer report outputs each resource group scanned and their potential issues. The report is color/emoji coded in term of Sanitizer severity levels:

The heading section for each Kubenertes resource scanned, provides an issue rollup summary count for each of the categories above.

The Summary section provides a Popeye Score based on the sanitization pass on the given cluster.

Known Issues

This initial drop is brittle. Popeye will most likely blow up...

• You're running older versions of Kubernetes. Popeye works best Kubernetes 1.13+.
• You don't have enough RBAC fu to manage your cluster (see RBAC section)
• Your cluster does not run a metric server.

Disclaimer

This is work in progress! If there is enough interest in the Kubernetes community, we will enhance per your recommendations/contributions. Also if you dig this effort, please let us know that too!

ATTA Girls/Boys!

Popeye sits on top of many of opensource projects and libraries. Our sincere appreciations to all the OSS contributors that work nights and weekends to make this project a reality!

Contact Info

1. Email: [email protected]
2. Twitter: @kitesurfer

 © 2019 Imhotep Software LLC. All materials licensed under Apache v2.0