Category Archives: Security

AWS: EKS Pod Identities – a replacement for IRSA? Simplifying IAM access management

16 December 2023
 

 Another very interesting new feature from the latest re:Invent is the EKS Pod Identities: a new ability to manage Pod access to AWS resources. The current state: IAM Roles for Service Accounts Before that, we used the IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA) model, where in order to give a Pod access to, for example,… Read More »

AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service: RBAC Authorization via AWS IAM and RBAC Groups

25 November 2023
 

 We have two new projects in the Elastic Kubernetes Service (см. AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service: a cluster creation automation, part 1 – CloudFormation), each project lives in its own separate Namespace. In addition, there are two users, developers, who need to be given access to these two Namespaces, but only to Pods in them and… Read More »

VictoriaMetrics: VMAuth – Proxy, Authentication, and Authorization

27 August 2023
 

  We continue to develop our monitoring stack. See the first part – VictoriaMetrics: creating a Kubernetes monitoring stack with its own Helm chart. What do we want to do next: give access to developers so that they can set Silence for alerts themselves in Alertmanager to avoid spamming Slack, see Prometheus: Alertmanager Web UI alerts… Read More »

AWS: Kubernetes – AWS Secrets Manager and Parameter Store integration

22 July 2023
 

  Storing access data in Kubernetes Secrets has an important drawback, because they are only available within the Kubernetes cluster itself. To make them available to external services, we can use Hashicorp Vault and integrate it with Kubernetes using solutions such as vault-k8sor use services from AWS – Secrets Manager or Parameter Store. Integrating AWS Secrets Manager and Parameter… Read More »

AWS: EKS, OpenID Connect, and ServiceAccounts

8 July 2023
 

  Currently, I’m setting up a new EKS cluster. Among other things, I’m running ExternalDNS on it, which uses a Kubernetes ServiceAccount to authenticate to AWS in order to be able to make changes to the domain zone in Route53. However, I forgot to configure the Identity Provider in AWS IAM and ExternalDNS threw an… Read More »

AWS: security – Instance Metadata Service v1 vs IMDS v2, Kubernetes Pod and Docker containers

24 April 2023
 

  Instance metadata (IMDS – Instance Metadata Service) – data about an EC2 instance, such as information about AMI, IP, hostname, etc. You can also add User Data to Instance Metadata to store some parameters, which can then be retrieved inside the instance. See Instance metadata and user data and Instance metadata categories. From the beginning of the… Read More »

Pritunl: running VPN in Kubernetes

5 October 2022
 

  Pritunl is a VPN server with a bunch of advanced security and access control features. In fact, it is just a wrapper over OpenVPN, adding such Access Control Lists to it in the form of Organizations, users, and routes. The task is to deploy a Pritunl test instance in Kubernetesб so we can take a… Read More »

AWS: VPC Flow Logs – an overview and example with CloudWatch Logs Insights

19 July 2022
 

  AWS VPC Flow Logs allow you to log traffic information between network interfaces in a VPC. Further, these logs can be stored in AWS S3 or sent to AWS CloudWatch Logs, while enabling traffic logging does not affect the performance of the network interface in any way. Let’s briefly review the basic concepts, and… Read More »