Kubernetes supports declarative management of objects using configurations written in YAML or JSON. Often, parts of the configuration will need to vary based on the runtime environment. For portability, and for separation of concerns, its best to maintain environment specific configurations separately from workload configurations.
Kyverno allows cluster adminstrators to manage environment specific configurations independently of workload configurations and enforce configuration best practices for their clusters.
Kyverno policies are Kubernetes resources that can be written in YAML or JSON. Kyverno policies can validate, mutate, and generate any Kubernetes resources.
Kyverno runs as a [dynamic admission controller](https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/extensible-admission-controllers/) in a Kubernetes cluster. Kyverno receives validating and mutating admission webhook HTTP callbacks from the kube-apiserver and applies matching policies to return results that enforce admission policies or reject requests.
Mutating policies can be written as overlays (similar to [Kustomize](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/manage-kubernetes-objects/kustomization/#bases-and-overlays)) or as a [JSON Patch](http://jsonpatch.com/). Validating policies also use an overlay style syntax, with support for pattern matching and conditional (if-then-else) processing.
[Open Policy Agent (OPA)](https://www.openpolicyagent.org/) is a general-purpose policy engine that can be used as a Kubernetes admission controller. It supports a large set of use cases. Policies are written using [Rego](https://www.openpolicyagent.org/docs/latest/how-do-i-write-policies#what-is-rego) a custom query language.
### External configuration management tools
Tools like [Kustomize](https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kustomize) can be used to manage variations in configurations outside of clusters. There are several advantages to this approach when used to produce variations of the same base configuration. However, such solutions cannot be used to validate or enforce configurations.
*Kyverno is under active development and not ready for production use. Key components and policy definitions are likely to change as we complete core features.*