Monokle vs Open Policy Agent Gatekeeper

Monokle Desktop is a free IDE for creating, exploring, and validating Kubernetes YAML configurations. It supports template-based resource creation, forms, Kubernetes-aware editing, schemas, and CRDs. Users can compare Git branches or repositories, resources across namespaces and clusters, and local configuration with the state of a running cluster. Real-time validation makes configuration issues visible; custom policies and output from CLI tools can also be checked. Helm charts and Kustomize overlays can be dry-run and previewed before deployment. For cluster inspection, Monokle can show resources, dependencies, Kubernetes events, and pod logs to help with troubleshooting. Listed integrations include Flux, Argo CD, Istio CRDs, Cert-Manager CRDs, Sealed Secrets, CDK8s, Tanka, and KPT. The download page describes it as a manifest creation, validation, and compliance IDE for developers, as well as a cluster inspection and troubleshooting tool for SREs. Monokle Desktop is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Kubeshop announced that Monokle Cloud and its accompanying GitHub app would be shut down, while open-source products would continue in their GitHub repositories.

Open Policy Agent Gatekeeper is a free, open-source Kubernetes policy controller for Linux and self-hosted deployments. It runs as a validating and mutating webhook, enforcing CRD-based policies evaluated by Open Policy Agent. Validation constraints can deny requests, warn, run in dry-run mode or report violations without changing resources. Mutation policies can alter matching resources during admission before validation checks the final object. An audit function periodically evaluates existing cluster resources against constraints to identify pre-existing misconfigurations. The project includes an extensible policy library with parameterized examples, and provider connections to external data such as image registries and directory services. Named integrations or backed services include Azure Policy for Kubernetes, Google Kubernetes Engine Policy Controller, Rancher, AWS EKS Blueprints and Alibaba Cloud. Installation options include prebuilt, development or locally built images and Helm. Gatekeeper requires Kubernetes resources introduced in version 1.16 and cluster-admin permissions for installation. The gator CLI is documented as beta from version 3.11.