Create Workspaces, Projects, Accounts and Roles

This quickstart demonstrates how to create workspaces, roles and user accounts which are required for other tutorials. Meanwhile, you will learn how to create projects and DevOps projects within your workspace where your workloads are running. After this tutorial, you will become familiar with the multi-tenant management system of KubeSphere.

Prerequisites

KubeSphere needs to be installed in your machine.

Estimated Time

About 15 minutes.

Architecture

The multi-tenant system of KubeSphere features three levels of hierarchical structure which are cluster, workspace and project. A project in KubeSphere is a Kubernetes namespace.

You are required to create a new workspace to work with instead of using the system workspace where system resources are running and most of them are viewable only. In addition, it is strongly recommended different tenants work with corresponding roles in a workspace for security considerations.

You can create multiple workspaces within a KubeSphere cluster. Under each workspace, you can also create multiple projects. Each level has multiple built-in roles. Besides, KubeSphere allows you to create roles with customized authorization as well. The KubeSphere hierarchy is applicable for enterprise users with different teams or groups, and different roles within each team.

Hands-on Lab

Step 1: Create an account

After KubeSphere is installed, you need to add different users with varied roles to the platform so that they can work at different levels on various resources. Initially, you only have one default account, which is admin, granted the role platform-admin. In the first step, you create an account user-manager and further create more accounts as user-manager.

1. Log in to the web console as admin with the default account and password (admin/[[email protected]](https://kubesphere.io/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection)).

   Tip

   For account security, it is highly recommended that you change your password the first time you log in to the console. To change your password, select User Settings in the drop-down menu in the top right corner. In Password Setting, set a new password. You also can change the console language in User Settings.

   

2. After you log in to the console, click Platform in the top-left corner and select Access Control.

   

   In Account Roles, there are four available built-in roles as shown below. The account to be created next will be assigned the role users-manager.

   Built-in Roles	Description
   workspaces-manager	The workspace manager on the platform who manages all workspaces on the platform.
   users-manager	The user manager on the platform who manages all users.
   platform-regular	The normal user on the platform who has no access to any resources before joining a workspace or cluster.
   platform-admin	The platform administrator who can manage all resources on the platform.

   Note

   Built-in roles are created automatically by KubeSphere and cannot be edited or deleted.

3. In Accounts, click Create. In the pop-up window, provide all the necessary information (marked with *) and select users-manager for Role. Refer to the image below as an example.

   

   Click OK after you finish. A newly-created account will display in Accounts.

4. Log out of the console and log back in with the account user-manager to create four accounts that will be used in other tutorials.

   Tip

   To log out, click your username in the top-right corner and select Log Out.

   Account	Role	Description
   ws-manager	workspaces-manager	Create and manage all workspaces.
   ws-admin	platform-regular	Manage all resources in a specified workspace (This account is used to invite new members to a workspace in this example).
   project-admin	platform-regular	Create and manage projects and DevOps projects, and invite new members into the projects.
   project-regular	platform-regular	project-regular will be invited to a project or DevOps project by project-admin. This account will be used to create workloads, pipelines and other resources in a specified project.

5. Verify the four accounts created.

   

Step 2: Create a workspace

In this step, you create a workspace using the account ws-manager created in the previous step. As the basic logic unit for the management of projects, DevOps projects and organization members, workspaces underpin the multi-tenant system of KubeSphere.

1. Log in to KubeSphere as ws-manager which has the permission to manage all workspaces on the platform. Click Platform in the top-left corner and select Access Control. In Workspaces, you can see there is only one default workspace system-workspace listed, where system-related components and services run. You are not allowed to delete this workspace.

   

2. Click Create on the right, name the new workspace demo-workspace and set the user ws-admin as the workspace manager shown in the screenshot below:

   

   Click Create after you finish.

   Note

   If you have enabled the multi-cluster feature, you need to assign an available cluster (or multiple clusters) to the workspace so that projects can be created on the cluster(s) later.

3. Log out of the console and log back in as ws-admin. In Workspace Settings, select Workspace Members and click Invite Member.

   

4. Invite both project-admin and project-regular to the workspace. Grant them the role workspace-self-provisioner and workspace-viewer respectively.

   Note

   The actual role name follows a naming convention: <workspace name>-<role name>. For example, in this workspace named demo-workspace, the actual role name of the role viewer is demo-workspace-viewer.

   

5. After you add both project-admin and project-regular to the workspace, click OK. In Workspace Members, you can see three members listed.

   Account	Role	Description
   ws-admin	workspace-admin	Manage all resources under the workspace (Use this account to invite new members to the workspace).
   project-admin	workspace-self-provisioner	Create and manage projects and DevOps projects, and invite new members to join the projects.
   project-regular	workspace-viewer	project-regular will be invited by project-admin to join a project or DevOps project. The account can be used to create workloads, pipelines, etc.

Step 3: Create a project

In this step, you create a project using the account project-admin created in the previous step. A project in KubeSphere is the same as a namespace in Kubernetes, which provides virtual isolation for resources. For more information, see Namespaces.

1. Log in to KubeSphere as project-admin. In Projects, click Create.

   

2. Enter the project name (e.g. demo-project) and click OK to finish. You can also add an alias and description for the project.

   

3. In Projects, click the project created just now to view its detailed information.

   

4. On the Overview page of the project, the project quota remains unset by default. You can click Set and specify resource requests and limits as needed (e.g. 1 core for CPU and 1000Gi for memory).

   

   

5. Invite project-regular to this project and grant this user the role operator. Refer to the image below for specific steps.

   

   Info

   The user granted the role operator will be a project maintainer who can manage resources other than users and roles in the project.

6. Before creating a Route which is Ingress in Kubernetes, you need to enable a gateway for this project. The gateway is an NGINX Ingress controller running in the project. To set a gateway, go to Advanced Settings in Project Settings and click Set Gateway. The account project-admin is still used in this step.

   

7. Choose the access method NodePort and click Save.

   

8. Under Internet Access, it can be seen that the Gateway Address and the NodePort of http and https all display on the page.

   Note

   If you want to expose services using the type LoadBalancer, you need to use the LoadBalancer plugin of cloud providers. If your Kubernetes cluster is running in a bare metal environment, it is recommended that you use PorterLB as the LoadBalancer plugin.

   

Step 4: Create a role

After you finish the above steps, you know that users can be granted different roles at different levels. The roles used in previous steps are all built-in ones created by KubeSphere itself. In this step, you will learn how to define a customized role to meet the needs in your work.

1. Log in to the KubeSphere web console as admin again and go to Access Control.

2. Click Account Roles on the left navigation bar and Create on the right.

   Note

   The preset roles on the Account Roles page cannot be edited and deleted.

3. In the Create Account Role dialog box, set the name (for example, clusters-admin), alias, and description of the role, and click Edit Permissions.

   Note

   This example demonstrates how to create a role responsible for cluster management.

4. In the Edit Permissions dialog box, set the role permissions (for example, select Cluster Management) and click OK.

   Note

   • In this example, the role clusters-admin contains the permissions Cluster Management and Cluster Viewing.
   • Some permissions depend on other permissions. The dependency is specified by the Depends on field under each permission.
   • When a permission is selected, the permission it depends on is automatically selected.
   • To deselect a permission, you need to deselect its subordinate permissions first.

5. On the Account Roles page, you can click the name of the created role to view the role details and click to edit or delete the role.

6. On the Accounts page, you can assign the role to an account when you create an account or edit an existing account.

Step 5: Create a DevOps project (Optional)

Note

To create a DevOps project, you must install the KubeSphere DevOps system in advance, which is a pluggable component providing CI/CD pipelines, Binary-to-image, Source-to-image, and more. For more information about how to enable DevOps, see KubeSphere DevOps System.

1. Log in to the console as project-admin. In DevOps Projects, click Create.

   

2. Enter the DevOps project name (e.g. demo-devops) and click OK. You can also add an alias and description for the project.

   

3. In DevOps Projects, click the project created just now to view its detailed information.

   

4. Go to Project Management and select Project Members. Click Invite Member to grant project-regular the role of operator, who is allowed to create pipelines and credentials.

   

You are now familiar with the multi-tenant management system of KubeSphere. In other tutorials, the account project-regular will also be used to demonstrate how to create applications and resources in a project or DevOps project.