Using service accounts in applications

Service accounts overview

A service account is an OKD account that allows a component to directly access the API. Service accounts are API objects that exist within each project. Service accounts provide a flexible way to control API access without sharing a regular user’s credentials.

When you use the OKD CLI or web console, your API token authenticates you to the API. You can associate a component with a service account so that they can access the API without using a regular user’s credentials. For example, service accounts can allow:

• Replication controllers to make API calls to create or delete pods.

• Applications inside containers to make API calls for discovery purposes.

• External applications to make API calls for monitoring or integration purposes.

Each service account’s user name is derived from its project and name:

system:serviceaccount:<project>:<name>

Every service account is also a member of two groups:

Each service account automatically contains two secrets:

• An API token

• Credentials for the OpenShift Container Registry

The generated API token and registry credentials do not expire, but you can revoke them by deleting the secret. When you delete the secret, a new one is automatically generated to take its place.

Default service accounts

Your OKD cluster contains default service accounts for cluster management and generates more service accounts for each project.

Default cluster service accounts

Several infrastructure controllers run using service account credentials. The following service accounts are created in the OKD infrastructure project (openshift-infra) at server start, and given the following roles cluster-wide:

Default project service accounts and roles

Three service accounts are automatically created in each project:

All service accounts in a project are given the system:image-puller role, which allows pulling images from any imagestream in the project using the internal container image registry.

About automatically generated service account token secrets

When a service account is created, a service account token secret is automatically generated for it. This service account token secret, along with an automatically generated docker configuration secret, is used to authenticate to the internal OKD registry. Do not rely on these automatically generated secrets for your own use; they might be removed in a future OKD release.

Workloads are automatically injected with a projected volume to obtain a bound service account token. If your workload needs an additional service account token, add an additional projected volume in your workload manifest. Bound service account tokens are more secure than service account token secrets for the following reasons:

• Bound service account tokens have a bounded lifetime.

• Bound service account tokens contain audiences.

• Bound service account tokens can be bound to pods or secrets and the bound tokens are invalidated when the bound object is removed.

For more information, see Configuring bound service account tokens using volume projection.

You can also manually create a service account token secret to obtain a token, if the security exposure of a non-expiring token in a readable API object is acceptable to you. For more information, see Creating a service account token secret.

Additional resources

• For information about requesting bound service account tokens, see Configuring bound service account tokens using volume projection.

• For information about creating a service account token secret, see Creating a service account token secret.

Creating service accounts

You can create a service account in a project and grant it permissions by binding it to a role.

Procedure

1. Optional: To view the service accounts in the current project:

   $ oc get sa

   Example output

   NAME       SECRETS   AGE
   builder    2         2d
   default    2         2d
   deployer   2         2d

2. To create a new service account in the current project:

   $ oc create sa <service_account_name> (1)

   1	To create a service account in a different project, specify -n <project_name>.

   Example output

   serviceaccount "robot" created

   You can alternatively apply the following YAML to create the service account: apiVersion: v1 kind: ServiceAccount metadata: name: <service_account_name> namespace: <current_project>

3. Optional: View the secrets for the service account:

   $ oc describe sa robot

   Example output

   Name:                robot
   Namespace:           project1
   Labels:                 <none>
   Annotations:         <none>
   Image pull secrets:  robot-dockercfg-qzbhb
   Mountable secrets:   robot-dockercfg-qzbhb
   Tokens:              robot-token-f4khf
   Events:              <none>