aws-ebs-csi-driver VS aws-iam-authenticator

The AWS EBS CSI Driver relies on IAM permissions to communicate with Amazon EBS for volume management on behalf of the user. The example policy can be used to define the required permissions. Additionally, AWS provides a managed policy at ARN arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AmazonEBSCSIDriverPolicy

I looks like the driver's permissions to invoke the EBS APIs was revoked and/or changed. When you install the EBS CSI addon you can either inherit permissions from the worker node or you can choose an IRSA role (preferred). If you use IRSA, the service account that the EBS CSI driver uses should have an annotation that references the ARN of the IAM role you selected, e.g. eks.amazonaws.com/role-arn: arn:aws:iam::111122223333:role/my-role. You can see an example of the IAM policy the driver needs here, https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-ebs-csi-driver/blob/fb6d456558fb291b13f855454c1525c7acaf7046/docs/example-iam-policy.json.

I'm know it's possible to write terraform code that exhibits that issue, but that's not the case in my experience. I'm using helm to deploy aws's ebs csi driver in the above setup. As you mentioned, if the eks cluster was destroyed before the helm provider attempted to use its API to destroy the helm deployment, it would cause problems. And I don't run into that issue. It's not luck of timing, either - I also have a CI process that deploys all of this, tests, and deletes it all that has succeeded hundreds of times.

Any Kubernetes cluster requires persistent storage - whether organizations choose to begin with an on-premise Kubernetes cluster and migrate to the public cloud, or provision a Kubernetes cluster using a managed service in the cloud. Kubernetes supports multiple types of persistent storage – from object storage (such as Azure Blob storage or Google Cloud Storage), block storage (such as Amazon EBS, Azure Disk, or Google Persistent Disk), or file sharing storage (such as Amazon EFS, Azure Files or Google Cloud Filestore). The fact that each cloud provider has its implementation of persistent storage adds to the complexity of storage management, not to mention a scenario where an organization is provisioning Kubernetes clusters over several cloud providers. To succeed in managing Kubernetes clusters over a long period, knowing which storage type to use for each scenario, requires storage expertise.

Lots of info in this issue: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-ebs-csi-driver/issues/1163

aws-ebs-csi-driver

Hello, we are running an EKS cluster (1.20) with aws-ebs-csi-driver (1.4.0). After recreating our whole cluster we can observe that the EBS volumes from our PVCs still exist but the "mapping" to the PVCs is gone.

OP could probably just layer their own CSI driver on top of an existing one (a la aws-ebs-csi-driver), but there's still several problems:

curl -Lo aws-iam-authenticator https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-iam-authenticator/releases/download/v0.5.9/aws-iam-authenticator_0.5.9_linux_amd64 chmod +x ./aws-iam-authenticator mkdir -p $HOME/bin && cp ./aws-iam-authenticator $HOME/bin/aws-iam-authenticator && export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin' >> ~/.bashrc

I will be setting up vcluster to work with aws-iam-authenticator. This should work just by following the readme, so I'll be spending extra time automating the setup.

Edit: Because I need to do this for more than one cluster and am creating clusters programmatically (AWS EKS API + CloudFormation/eksctl), I would like to minimize the overhead of creating ServiceAccounts across many cluster contexts, across many AWS accounts. Ideally, the only authentication step involved in creating my clientset is using aws-iam-authenticator to get a token using cluster data (name, region, CA cert, etc). There hasn't been a release of aws-iam-authenticator for a while, but the contents of master allow for the use of a third-party role cross-account role and external ID to be passed. IMO, this is cleaner than using a ServiceAccount (and IRSA) because there are other AWS services the application (the backend API which creates and applies add-ons to these clusters) needs to interact with.

Access to Kubernetes clusters in Amazon EKS is controlled by the AWS IAM Authenticator for Kubernetes. The authenticator runs on the EKS control plane and depends on the aws-auth ConfigMap for configuration settings. Every time you use kubectl to perform actions on the EKS cluster, the AWS IAM Authenticator generates an STS token (AWS Security Token Service). Kubernetes uses the IAM authenticator service to verify the identity of users specified in this security token.

As someone who is a big fan of Teleport, sorry, I just don't get it.

> Teleport doesn't provide identity provider integrations beyond GitHub (e.g. Okta) in their open source project

Right, and if you're a small team (5-10 people, like you're targeting) you don't really need SSO on the infra layer. It's a nice to have, it's best practice, but the truth is, by the time you really need it (enough engineers that account management is a pain), you typically have the budget for an Enterprise license.

> They have a different architecture that involves deploying a centralized proxy service (whereas Infra verifies credentials at the destination infrastructure vs at a central proxy).

So anyway you need to deploy something central to issue certificates. And anyway, if, to quote you, "We plan to make money by running a managed service version of Infra so teams don’t need to host and upgrade Infra manually.", isn't that the central proxy service? Yet the open-source version avoids it somehow?

> We plan to make money by running a managed service version of Infra so teams don’t need to host and upgrade Infra manually

So you want to sell to teams that a) are too small to afford the license for a product like Teleport Enterprise, b) have enough money that they can afford a premium product above and beyond the free offering provided by their Kubernetes vendor, like https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-iam-authenticator (for EKS), c) are willing to install and maintain another agent on their cluster (infra), but aren't willing to install and maintain the central proxy point?

> we've designed Infra around an extensible REST API from the start whereas Teleport uses GRPC.

This isn't really important from a product perspective. For what it's worth, Teleport started with a REST API; they moved to gRPC because, if I recall correctly, gRPC helped them scale to support larger infrastructure better.

If you're launching a competing product to Teleport, which is now by far the most mature product in the space, then currently, at least from where I'm sitting, you aren't offering sufficient added value compared to the incumbent offerings, which also include CloudFlare Access, Checkpoint Harmony Connect SASE, Hashicorp Boundary (their offerings aren't quite Kubernetes native, but it's the same idea)...

If you’re looking for a cloud provider that caters to identity and access management, then tools like aws-iam-authenticator (AWS) and Anthos Identity Service (Google) are good places to start.

AWS IAM Authenticator.

aws-auth configmap is based on aws-iam-authenticator and has several configuration options: