ADR-004: Roles and Service Accounts¶
Context¶
We need to define roles and service accounts to allow all our use cases. Our first concerns are to allow the following:
- Users should be able to deploy (manually in test cluster, via the deploy API in production clusters), but we do not want them by default to read secrets
- Admins should get full access to all resources, mostly for emergency access
- Applications should not get by default write access to the Kubernetes API
- It should be possible for some applications to write to the Kubernetes API.
Decision¶
We define the following Roles:
- ReadOnly: allowed to read every resource, but not secrets. “exec” and “proxy” and similar operations are not allowed. Allowed to do “port-forward” to special proxy, which will enable DB access.
- PowerUser: “restricted” Pod Security Policy with write access to all namespaces but kube-system, ReadOnly access to kube-system namespace, “exec” and “proxy” are allowed, RW for secrets, no write of daemonsets. DB access through “port-forward” and special proxy.
- Operator: “privileged” Pod Security Policy with write access to the own namespace and read and write access to third party resources in all namespaces.
- Controller: Kubernetes component controller-manager is not allowed to “use” other Pod Security Policies then “restricted”, such that serviceAccount authorization is used to check the permission. To all other resources it has full access.
- Admin: full access to all resources
And the following pairs <namespace, service account> that will get the listed role, assigned by the WebHook:
- “kube-system:default” - Admin
- “default:default” - ReadOnly
- “*:operator” - Operator
- kube-controller-manager - Controller
- kubelet - Admin
Application that will want write access to the Kubernetes API will have to use the “operator” service account.
Status¶
Accepted.
Consequences¶
This decision is a breaking change of what was previously defined for applications. Users that need applications with write access to the Kubernetes API will need to select the right service account. The controller-manager has now an identity and uses the secured kube-apiserver endpoint, such that it can be authorized by the webhook.