KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024

Kubernetes RBAC is an effective way of managing ACLs in one cluster. However, there are many other effective paradigms out there, such as Attribute- & Relation-based Access Control. In this talk, we’ll demystify how these differ, and when to use respective paradigms, giving context and guidance. We’ll highlight how Kubernetes access control has recently evolved towards supporting lots of different use-cases. We take this opportunity to cover multiple perspectives: security within a single cluster (zooming in) and security within real-life production environments with external services and multiple clusters (zooming out). As containers became ubiquitous first with excellent tools like Docker, we believe the same can and will happen for access control, yielding uniform, interoperable and understandable authorization. Finally, we'll propose future work that could be done to supercharge Kubernetes and ensure it keeps up with the ever increasing security requirements in our industry.