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August 25, 2025

AKS Zero-Trust Access: Arc, OPA Gatekeeper & On-Prem

10 minutes

Architecting zero-trust access to an AKS cluster from on-prem legacy systems is one of those senior interview questions that exposes whether you actually understand the control plane or just know the buzzwords.

You'll learn:

How Azure Arc projects on-prem and legacy workloads into the Azure control plane without exposing the API server publicly

Where OPA Gatekeeper fits — enforcing admission policies at the Kubernetes layer so workloads that pass network controls still get policy-checked

Layering Azure AD Workload Identity and managed identities to eliminate long-lived credentials between legacy systems and AKS

Private endpoint and Azure Private Link design decisions that keep east-west traffic off the public internet

Common gotchas: Gatekeeper constraint template scope, Arc-enabled Kubernetes agent connectivity requirements, and policy exemption risks

Keywords: AKS zero-trust, Azure Arc Kubernetes, OPA Gatekeeper interview, on-prem to AKS security, Azure private endpoint AKS

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