A small utility to find bad ownerReferences in a Kubernetes cluster

The ownerReferences field in Kubernetes object metadata allows objects to be automatically cleaned up when their "owner(s)" are deleted. However, there are specific rules about the owner/owned relationship. For example:

• Cross-namespace ownership is not allowed
• Namespaced objects cannot own a cluster-scoped object

When these rules are violated, the Kubernetes garbage collector may delete resources unexpectedly. This utility scans all the objects in a cluster and validates that the owner references are correct.

$ go get github.com/JohnStrunk/badref
go: downloading github.com/JohnStrunk/badref v0.0.0-20201021144329-e37e4c101b62
go: github.com/JohnStrunk/badref upgrade => v0.0.0-20201021144329-e37e4c101b62

$ badref --kubeconfig /path/to/kubeconfig
Discovered 263 resources
Scanned 252 objects
Checked 6 owner references
All ok!