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Show HN: Kubernetes Permission Manager, Free and OSS Tool to Manage RBAC/Users (github.com)
37 points by jnardiello 2331 days ago
5 comments
charlieegan3 2331 days ago
It might be good to clarify your expected users.

Most Kubernetes users I have worked with integrated with some cloud provider auth or similar to grant permissions to Kubernetes resources.

I can see this being useful for smaller deployments or when such integrations are unavailable but it might be worth explaining that in the readme of the project.

Also, how do you see this working in the config as code / ‘gitops’ world? How does this work for clusters in different environments?

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jnardiello 2331 days ago
You are entirely correct, we started this project as an internal tool to be used in any environment where no integration with IAM/OIDC/LDAP/AD/etc.. was available (we handle LOTS of clusters and many of them are in this situation).

So, this is mostly recommended (as you said) for smaller projects/teams/orgs but we figured out this would still be useful to many so we just open sourced it.

It's also entirely true that you can use it in any cluster, as Kubernetes under the hood does NOT have any concept of "user" it's just a bunch of certificates with some roles attached, so you can actually deploy it anywhere and you can use to release certs on the fly for your users.

As for gitops, that's a great questions we got asked a few times today. It's just no there right now, this is a nice web ui wrapping RBAC primitives. We'll surely be working on it soon.

Hopefully, this was clear. Let me know if you have more questions.

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znpy 2331 days ago
Thanks, this solves a very important problem in the k8s ecosystem.

For me personally, I've spent the weekends of the last two months learning ldap basics only to find out that k8s+ldap is another mess on its own.

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benwilson-512 2331 days ago
This looks very cool. Is there a story for managing users associated with AWS IAM roles or users?
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aliljet 2331 days ago
This is honestly pretty fantastic. How does this compare with things like Dex+Gangway?
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jnardiello 2331 days ago
Entirely different use-case. This is a simplified way to create new users, templates and distribute certificates to access a cluster. It does NOT integrate with external ldaps/ad/etc..
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streetcat1 2331 days ago
so, can you compare this to the OPA? Are you integrating with the OPA?

Also, there was an old project called casbin which is used by ArgoCD.

In my system, I created an Account CRD and let an account controller do all the logic. This way you do not need another api server.

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jnardiello 2331 days ago
Not related to OPA. This is not an admission webhook, nor deals with gatekeeper and such, it does not enforce policies. It's a simple abstraction on the certs creation mechanisms and native Kubernetes RBAC.
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