Why PandoCore Ships Its Security Webhook Fail-Open Instead of Fail-Closed
PandoCore, a Kubernetes security vendor, deliberately configures its admission webhook with failurePolicy: Ignore rather than the conventionally recommended Fail setting. The company argues that a fail-closed webhook can freeze pod scheduling cluster-wide during outages, causing ReplicaSet failures, stalled deployments, and autoscaler blockages — an operational risk it considers greater than the security gap. To compensate for the silent nature of fail-open failures, PandoCore engineers the webhook to monitor every pod in protected namespaces and raise Kubernetes warning events plus Prometheus alerts when a pod is admitted without its security sidecar. The company also excludes its own namespace unconditionally, preventing the webhook from ever blocking its own pod recovery. PandoCore acknowledges one remaining gap — alerting for when the webhook itself goes completely dark — and says a single Prometheus absence rule would close it.
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