If you plan to deploy PostgreSQL on Kubernetes, securing the system as much as possible is essential. You can follow the instructions in this article to accomplish this.
Encrypting your database data will be one of your initial tasks. Many cloud providers offer this out of the box, and it can offer some defense against various attack vectors.
Encryption
Securing PostgreSQL on Kubernetes requires a combination of security technologies and processes. This includes encryption, authentication, access control, and monitoring.
Encryption scrambles data to hide it from snooping eyes, protecting information from online attacks. This helps keep sensitive data like banking details and other personal information from falling into the wrong hands.
PostgreSQL supports encryption via various methods, including file system and full disk encryption. These methods are transparent to the database server and require no configuration.
Additionally, PostgreSQL can also support TLS connections and client authentication. This allows automated systems to connect to a PostgreSQL server using certificates.
For added protection, servers and clients can use certificate revocation lists to reject a server or client that does not have a valid certificate. This can help prevent the spoofing of automated connections across the network.
PostgreSQL provides a range of features that can help organizations secure their data at rest, such as data-at-rest encryption and write-ahead logs (WAL). It also has an impressive reputation for reliability, feature robustness, and performance.
Monitoring
An open-source object-relational database called PostgreSQL is renowned for its dependability and data integrity. Foreign key joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures are supported, and it complies with ACID. It is frequently utilized for mission-critical systems that need scalability and high availability.
Kubernetes is a containerized deployment platform that allows teams to deploy, manage, scale, and automate containerized workloads. It helps reduce infrastructure complexity and increases the speed of development, deployment, and scaling.
To deploy PostgreSQL on Kubernetes, it’s essential to monitor your system so that you can identify any performance issues that may arise. For example, monitoring metrics such as cache hit ratio, commit/rollback rates, and conflicts/deadlocks can help you identify the root cause of performance issues.
You can use the operator to monitor your PostgreSQL cluster and receive alerts if these metrics change. You can add custom tag(s) to your PostgreSQL metrics and limit metric collection to specific schemas.
Authentication
Authentication is a crucial security control for protecting your PostgreSQL database and Kubernetes clusters. To prevent unwanted access, you should implement robust authentication methods, such as SSL/TLS and multifactor authentication.
PostgreSQL’s internal authentication, OS-based authentication, and external authentication are good ways to secure your database and Kubernetes deployments. However, it would help if you also considered implementing a robust password management solution to protect against brute force attacks and other unauthorized users.
As an added layer of protection, you should enable PostgreSQL to log connections and session details like duration and disconnection. This can help you identify unusual connections and sessions across time.
You can set up your Kubernetes cluster to regularly upgrade your PostgreSQL and Kubernetes versions. GKE will automatically upgrade you based on the release channel you select.
In addition to these features, you can also set up a secret object for your PostgreSQL and Kubernetes deployments to ensure confidential data remains safe. You can set up hidden objects with various methods, including via Kubectl, from files, and by writing YAML manifests.
Access Control
Access control is the ability to restrict the number of users who can access specific resources. This allows database administrators to secure databases by keeping access to them limited to internal network users only.
On Kubernetes, the access control used by PostgreSQL is primarily role-based. Roles are labels that Kubernetes uses to map between user accounts and resources in the cluster.
The Kubernetes API provides a set of authentication methods and auths tokens that you can use to authenticate users securely. The safest way to protect a user account is to ensure the user can only be shown using one of these methods.
In addition, you should ensure that all data is stored in container volumes offering dynamic storage provisioning. This helps to comply with stateful workloads such as PostgreSQL, which needs to be able to preserve their data if pod restarts occur.
Backup
PostgreSQL is a highly-reliable, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). It has been designed to scale and manage data workloads with features allowing various applications to run reliably.
As a result, it is an excellent fit for Kubernetes, allowing scalability and flexibility to handle a wide range of workloads. This is particularly true when running stateful databases, whose storage needs are complex and require high availability.
A backup should be stored securely and in a location that is physically remote from the production environment and should take place at regular intervals to ensure business continuity. Depending on the data backup requirements and scalability needs, several techniques can be used to achieve these goals, including disk-based snapshots, BART, and cloud volumes.
