Show Me Your Code with Enrique Paredes: Kubernetes Permission Manager

05 May 2020 - Tags: show-me-your-code, kubernetes

Kubernetes when it comes to authentication and authorization is extremely complicated.

I think its philosophy is well described in the documentation:

Normal users are assumed to be managed by an outside, independent service. An admin distributing private keys, a user store like Keystone or Google Accounts, even a file with a list of usernames and passwords. In this regard, Kubernetes does not have objects which represent normal user accounts. Normal users cannot be added to a cluster through an API call.

Kubernetes has user but they have to come from the outside, it is not its business to care about them. For authorization it uses RBAC and you have a very long list of possibilities and combinations between actions like: LIST, WATCH, CREATE, DELETE and resources: pods, deployments, ingress, services…

Sighup is a company based in Italy and well known for their contributions to the Cloud Native ecosystem. One of their last project is called permission-manager, it is open source and it can be describe as follow: “it is a project that brings sanity to Kubernetes RBAC and Users management, Web UI FTW”.

I will host Enrique (@twitter) to talk about the challenges he had when writing such a crucial project, hoping to see some code!

Links:

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