Production Kubernetes

Chapter 10. Identity

Establishing the identity of both users and application workloads is a key concern when designing and implementing a Kubernetes platform. No one wants to be in the news for having their systems breached. So it’s vital that we ensure that only the appropriately privileged entities (human or application) can access particular systems or take certain actions. For this we need to ensure that there are both Authentication and Authorization systems implemented. As a refresher:

• Authentication is the process of establishing the identity of an application or user.

• Authorization is the process of determining what actions an application or user are able to do, after they have been authenticated.

This chapter is solely focused on authentication. That’s not to say that authorization is not important, and we will touch on it briefly where appropriate. For more information you should definitely research Role Based Access Control (RBAC) in Kubernetes (there are many great resources available) and ensure that you have a solid strategy for implementing it for your own applications, so that you understand the permissions that are required by any external applications that you might deploy.

Establishing identity for the purposes of authentication is a key requirement of almost every distributed system. A simple example of this that everyone has used is a username and password. Together, the information identifies you as a user of the system. In this context then, identity ...