Overcoming Infrastructure Obstacles When Deploying Production-Ready Kubernetes

Chapter 4. Operations and Security

If you don’t secure Kubernetes and its associated networking components, your business might get cryptojacked or worse. Likewise, just getting the applications onto the platform in the first place is only the first step in a long production lifetime—good monitoring is critical to make sure they keep running fast and smoothly. In this section, we’ll cover operations and security challenges and possible solutions you should investigate while adopting Kubernetes.

Authentication and Authorization

Operations in Kubernetes entail a lot of challenges around client authentication and authorization. After all, how do you, the operator of a Kubernetes cluster, know and trust that the Kubernetes client attempting to connect and perform API calls is who they say they are and should be trusted? Authentication is the process of ensuring that the client making the request has a particular identity. Authorization is the process of making sure that, once authenticated, the client has permission to perform the action they’re attempting.

These concepts are important for automation on top of Kubernetes as well as manual operator access because permissions should always be scoped down as much as possible. After all, cluster admin access on Kubernetes is root-level access on the whole cluster—otherwise, Kubernetes wouldn’t be able to perform all the operations it needs to deliver its end results.

Kubernetes provides some constructs for managing these issues, but ...