Identity Authentication and Access Control

CCI permissions management allows you to grant permissions to your IAM users and user groups. It combines the advantages of Kubernetes Role-based Access Control (RBAC) authorization and Identity and Access Management (IAM) to provide a variety of authorization methods, including IAM fine-grained authorization, IAM token authorization, namespace-level authorization, and namespaced resource authorization.

• Namespace-level permissions: permissions granted based on Kubernetes RBAC roles. You can authorize users or user groups to perform operations on Kubernetes resources under specific namespace.
• CCI permissions: permissions granted based on IAM fine-grained authorization. You can authorize users to perform operations on namespaces, such as creating and deleting namespaces.

• If you enable RBAC when you create a namespace, access to resources under the namespace is controlled by RBAC policies. If RBAC is disabled, RBAC policies will not take effect.
• After you create a namespace with RBAC enabled, you must authorize IAM users to perform operations on the namespace.
• The network, ClusterRole, and RoleBinding resources are not affected by RBAC policies but are controlled only by IAM fine-grained authentication. The network resources are controlled by network-related actions, and ClusterRole and RoleBinding are controlled by RBAC-related actions.
• You can grant permissions for all namespaces of an IAM user at the same time.

Figure 1 CCI permissions management

Namespace Permissions

Kubernetes RBAC APIs define four objects: Role, ClusterRole, RoleBinding, and ClusterRoleBinding. Currently, CCI supports only ClusterRole and RoleBinding. The two objects are described as follows:

• ClusterRole specifies which actions can be performed on which resources. In the RBAC API, a role contains rules that represent a set of permissions. A role within a Kubernetes cluster is defined by a ClusterRole.
• RoleBinding binds roles to subjects (including users and user groups). A RoleBinding grants the permissions defined in a role to a user or user group. The user or group has the permissions granted through the bound ClusterRole.

Table 1 Two objects declared by the RBAC API

Type	Description
ClusterRole	A ClusterRole can be used to grant access to resources in a cluster.
RoleBinding	A RoleBinding binds a ClusterRole to subjects (users) in a namespace, granting the ClusterRole's permissions to those users.

Currently, you can only use ClusterRole to create a RoleBinding in a namespace.

In CCI, you can regulate users' or user groups' access to Kubernetes resources in a single namespace based on their Kubernetes RBAC roles.

Currently, there are four roles: cluster-admin, admin, edit, and view. For details, see Table 2.

For more information about Kubernetes RBAC authorization, see Using RBAC Authorization.