RBAC Usage Scenarios
RBAC can be used in various scenarios to isolate team access, limit resource access, restrict operations, control admin access, and manage service account permissions.
- Isolating Team Access: Suppose we have multiple teams working in the same Kubernetes cluster but on different applications. You can use RBAC to ensure that the developers from one group don’t accidentally (or intentionally) modify the resources of another team. You do this by creating roles that have access to only specific namespaces and binding those roles to the respective teams.
- Limiting Resource Access: We might have certain sensitive resources in your cluster, like secrets or config maps, that should only be accessed by certain individuals or applications. With RBAC, you can restrict access to these resources to only those who absolutely need it.
- Restricting Operations: Not every user or application needs to perform every type of operation. For example, you might have a CI/CD pipeline that only needs to be able to create and delete pods, or a monitoring tool that only needs to be able to read the status of all resources. With RBAC, you can create roles that have only the necessary permissions and no more.
- Admin Access Control: We might want to give certain users the ability to administer the cluster, but not all users should have this ability. With RBAC, you can create a ClusterRole that has administrative permissions and bind that role to only the appropriate users.
- Service Account Permissions: Service accounts are a particular type of user that represent applications rather than humans. RBAC can be used to control what these service accounts can do, which is important for maintaining the security of your cluster.
How To Use Kubernetes RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)?
In a nutshell, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is a method of regulating access to computer or network resources based on the roles of individual users within an organization. In the context of Kubernetes, RBAC is a security feature that controls access to resources within your cluster. It allows you to specify what actions a user or a group of users can and cannot perform. This is vital in a team environment, where not everyone should have full, unrestricted access to all resources.
Before we go further, let’s briefly understand the architecture of Kubernetes. Kubernetes follows a master-worker node architecture. The master node is responsible for maintaining the desired state (like which applications or other workloads should be running and which nodes they live on), and the worker nodes actually run the workloads.
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