kubelogin VS kops

Authenticating with Kyma is a (in my opinion) unnecessary challenge as it leverages the OIDC-login plugin for kubectl. You find a description of the setup here. This works fine when on a Mac but can give you some headaches on a Windows and on Linux machine especially when combined with restrictive setups in corporate environments. For Windows I can only recommend installing krew via chocolatey and then install the OIDC plugin via kubectl krew install oidc-login. At least for me that was the only way to get this working on Windows.

It is sort of a roundabout way, but I sync Active Directory to a Keycloak realm, then use OIDC auth with kube-oidc-proxy (https://github.com/jetstack/kube-oidc-proxy) and kubelogin (https://github.com/int128/kubelogin) for OIDC-based auth to the api server.

Yes, I setup a cluster with no SPFs. That means an HA setup for the external load balancer. I use HAProxy for my ELB, and setup 2 instances with a VRRP + keepalived to provide HA to the ingress controller. I run the control plane private, accessible only from localhost. I setup kube-oidc-proxy (https://github.com/jetstack/kube-oidc-proxy) to expose the API server with single sign-on on the ingress controller, and use the kubelogin plugin (https://github.com/int128/kubelogin) to provide OIDC support to kubectl. I then setup Keycloak to handle OIDC/OAuth2/SAML and syncing to Active Directory, and setup groups in Active Directory to control acccess to clusters. Devs each get their own namespace in the dev cluster, with mostly cluster-admin access to their namespace. Staging/Prod clusters are locked down, with read-only access to devs. Thanks to the OIDC auth to the APIServer, when employees are onboarded & offboarded, we only need to add/remove them from groups in Active Directory and everything else just magically syncs.

I've successfully configured kube-apiserver to authenticate users through oidc (https://github.com/int128/kubelogin) so all the users from my keycloak realm can access to the cluster with their credentials.

Link to GitHub Repository

kubelogin (helper for k8s build in OIDC support)

I use the kube-login plugin for kubectl (https://github.com/int128/kubelogin) along with the kube-oidc-proxy (https://github.com/jetstack/kube-oidc-proxy), using Keycloak as my OIDC provider (https://www.keycloak.org) and doing LDAP synchronization to Active Directory.

Dex oauth and kubelogin. We happen to use google auth in our org, but dex is pretty flexible. You only have to have a way to distribute server certificates. We then have documented script commands to pull certs and create kubectl fig files. OpenUnison always looked interesting, but dex has been good enough for our uses.

With a working dex/OIDC configuration, you could use: https://github.com/int128/kubelogin

The general problem of patching resource definitions that are not fully under your control has also been recognized for some time. This is true of default resources created and updated by cluster maintenance tools (e.g. kOps), or by public helm charts that you use to install common services and operators (e.g. nginx-ingress, cert-manager, and so on). High quality charts will allow you to override the configuration of important components such as service account references, but some simpler charts offer much less configuration.

The kops documentation is not very clear about this.

Very fast progress and great article with lots of useful information. I found myself nodding a lot having recently seen GitLab Dedicated https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/subscriptions/gitlab_dedicated/ being developed that had my similar challenges. I wonder what other people think of Kops https://kops.sigs.k8s.io/

note: I work with kube on a daily basis. All current clusters under my care use a managed backplane service though there are a number of small (3+ years-old) clusters that I still keep an eye on that were initialized using kops.

kOps with your own instances.

Companies run their own clusters (sometimes for cost reasons), using tools like kops, and kubeadm to set up their own clusters.

curl -Lo kops https://github.com/kubernetes/kops/releases/download/$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/kubernetes/kops/releases/latest | grep tag_name | cut -d '"' -f 4)/kops-linux-amd64 chmod +x kops sudo mv kops /usr/local/bin/

Kops is a cluster setup and management command line tool that deploys a Kubernetes cluster to AWS. It provides configuration abstractions such as manifest YAML files that facilitate node and components configuration. And like Ansible, it will provide dry-run capabilities and ensures idempotency of changing the nodes.