Kubernetes: How do I tell what GCP service account my service is running as?

Kubernetes is a powerful container orchestration tool that has become increasingly popular in recent years. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides native support for Kubernetes through its Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) service. One of the challenges with Kubernetes is managing the authentication and authorization of the various services running on the platform.

In this article, we will explore how to identify the GCP service account that a Kubernetes service is running as.

Step 1: Connect to your Kubernetes cluster

Before you can identify the GCP service account that a Kubernetes service is running as, you must first connect to your Kubernetes cluster. You can do this using the kubectl command-line tool. If you have not already installed kubectl, you can follow the instructions provided by Kubernetes to download and install it for your operating system.

Step 2: Identify the pod that the service is running on

The first step in identifying the GCP service account that a Kubernetes service is running as is to identify the pod that the service is running on. You can do this using the kubectl command:

kubectl get pods

This will list all of the pods running in your Kubernetes cluster. Look for the pod that corresponds to the service you are interested in.

Step 3: Get the service account associated with the pod

Once you have identified the pod that the service is running on, you can use the following command to get the service account associated with the pod:

kubectl get pod <pod-name> -o=jsonpath='{.spec.serviceAccount}'

Replace <pod-name> with the name of the pod that you identified in step 2.

Step 4: Determine the corresponding GCP service account

The service account associated with the pod is typically a Kubernetes service account, which is a namespace-scoped resource in Kubernetes. To determine the corresponding GCP service account, you can use the following command:

kubectl get serviceaccount <service-account-name> -o=jsonpath='{.secrets[*].name}' | xargs -I{} kubectl get secret {} -o=jsonpath='{.data.	oken}' | base64 -d | awk -F: '{print $NF}'

Replace <service-account-name> with the name of the service account that you obtained in step 3.

This command will decode the service account token and extract the associated GCP service account email.

Step 5: Verify the GCP service account

You can verify the GCP service account associated with the pod by checking the credentials used by the pod to authenticate with other GCP services. For example, if the pod is running a Google Cloud Storage (GCS) client, you can check the credentials used by the client by running the following command:

kubectl exec <pod-name> -- gsutil ls -l

Replace <pod-name> with the name of the pod that you identified in step 2.

The output of this command will include the email address of the GCP service account used by the GCS client.

So, identifying the GCP service account that a Kubernetes service is running as can be accomplished by following a few simple steps. By understanding which service accounts are associated with which pods, you can more easily manage the authentication and authorization of your Kubernetes services.

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That's it for this post. Keep practicing and have fun. Leave your comments if any.