Authentication

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In this section, we will take a look at authentication in a kubernetes cluster

Accounts

Different users that may be accessing the cluster security of end users who access the applications deployed on the cluster is managed by the applications themselves internally.

So, we left with 2 types of users
- Humans, such as the Administrators and Developers
- Robots such as other processes/services or applications that require access to the cluster.
All user access is managed by apiserver and all of the requests goes through apiserver.

Authentication Mechanisms

There are different authentication mechanisms that can be configured.

Authentication Mechanisms - Basic

kube-apiserver configuration

If you set up via kubeadm then update kube-apiserver.yaml manifest file with the option.

Authenticate User

To authenticate using the basic credentials while accessing the API server specify the username and password in a curl command.

$ curl -v -k http://master-node-ip:6443/api/v1/pods -u "user1:password123"

We can have additional column in the user-details.csv file to assign users to specific groups.

Note

K8s Reference Docs

https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/authentication/