Teleport Blog - Authenticate against GKE without gcloud - Oct 3, 2018
Authenticate against GKE without gcloud
Introduction
In this post we'll explain how to generate and use ~/.kube/config
for
Kubernetes clusters running on GKE without having to install Google Cloud Tools
like gcloud
. This can be impractical on machines that use automation (run
CI/CD). Or perhaps you wish to keep your Kubernetes tooling independent
of a specific cloud provider.
First, let's go over the regular workflow of a GKE user:
Authenticating with GKE
If you are adopting Google's Kubernetes Engine (aka,
GKE) you will want to connect kubectl
to your GKE-hosted Kubernetes cluster.
Usually, this is accomplished by pressing "connect" button on GKE portal
which then brings up something like the following instruction:
We will copy & paste the shell command from above for better clarity:
$ gcloud container clusters get-credentials <cluster-name> --project <project-name>
Generates a ~/.kube/config
file with the necessary credentials for
kubectl
to use. However, it also means that:
- You must have
gcloud
installed on your machine. - You must be authenticated with Google's cloud first.
- You have to have a web browser available, i.e. the authentication is interactive.
Below is the complete sequence of commands you'll have to use to generate ~/.kube/config
with the gcloud
tool:
# This will open a web browser and you'll authenticate with your email, password
# and the second factor (which you of course should be using)
$ gcloud auth login
# And now generate the kubeconfig:
$ gcloud container clusters get-credentials my-cluster --zone us-central1-a --project my-project
# Check if it works:
$ kubectl get nodes
if you did everything right, you should see the list of nodes in the cluster. Obviously this is not optimal for robots, CI/CD pipeline, etc.
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Authenticating Without Google Cloud Tools
The setup above works quite well if you're using it on a laptop which has a web browser installed and you are only using GKE Kubernetes clusters. However, many of our customers have expressed interest in using Kubernetes-native authentication which does not depend on Google's proprietary tooling and does not require the user to interactively login via a web browser.
Fortunately, this is quite easy to do!
Here is what you need to do to non-interactively authenticate against GKE Kubernetes clusters without using the certificate authentication built into Kubernetes itself:
- First, obtain the GKE credentials using the workflow described above. You have to do this just once.
- Connect to the Kubernetes cluster and request a new certificate using the Kubernetes CSR API. We have a sample script. You can use as a starting point (or as-is).
The resulting kubeconfig
can be placed on CI/CD machines and used in any kind
of infrastructure automation which requires kubectl
.
The certificate returned by the CSR API does not have an expiration date and will keep working forever. If you wish to automatically rotate these certificates, you can implement your own tooling around this, or use Teleport, our infrastructure gateway which provides unified access to both SSH and Kubernetes clusters.
Update: we've been contacted via Twitter by a Google Engineer who has written a blog article for the very same scenario.
Instead of creating a new certificate, he uses a workstation where gcloud
is
present and creates a static kubeconfig
which is then copied to the target
system that will use it. You can find his article
here.
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