Kubernetes Authentication plugins and kubeconfig
Kubernetes offers several different authentication mechanisms or plugins. The goal of this post is to review each of them and provide a brief example of how they work. In addition, we’ll talk about the ‘kubeconfig’ file and how it’s used in association with authentication plugins.
Note: In theory there’s no requirement to use any of these authentication plugins. With the proper configuration, the API server can accept requests over HTTP on any given insecure port you like. However – doing so is insecure and somewhat limiting because some features of Kubernetes rely on using authentication so it’s recommended to use one or more of the following plugins.
Kubernetes offers 3 default authentication plugins as of version 1.0. These plugins are used to authenticate requests against the API server. Since they’re used for communication to the API, that means that they apply to both the Kubelet and Kube-Proxy running on your server nodes as well as any requests or commands you issue through the kubectl CLI tool. Let’s take a look at each option…
Client Certificate Authentication
This is the most common method of authentication and is widely used to authentication node back Continue reading




