An intent-based solution for network isolation in Kubernetes

Cloud computing has transformed the landscape of application delivery, offering an enormous pool of devices with a wide-spread geographical distribution. In this context, liquid computing is a novel paradigm that aims to avoid that available resources are underutilized, by facilitating their seamless sharing among different tenants and administrative domains. Nevertheless, liquid computing introduces new security challenges, particularly related to network isolation, which traditional approaches are inadequate to address. Therefore, this paper proposes a security orchestrator to automate the configuration of network isolation primitives across a multi-domain and multi-tenant cloud environment, simplifying the implementation of security patterns like zero trust and least privilege. The proposed solution is intent-driven, because users define their requirements in terms of desired and prohibited network communications through a user-friendly language. In our implemented proposal, intents expressed by different users are harmonized to avoid discordances among them, and then they are translated into Kubernetes Network Policies as isolation primitives.