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.

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

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-token-f4khf
                          robot-dockercfg-qzbhb
   Tokens:                robot-token-f4khf
                          robot-token-z8h44

Using a service account’s credentials externally

You can distribute a service account’s token to external applications that must authenticate to the API.

In order to pull an image, the authenticated user must have get rights on the requested imagestreams/layers. In order to push an image, the authenticated user must have update rights on the requested imagestreams/layers.

By default, all service accounts in a project have rights to pull any image in the same project, and the builder service account has rights to push any image in the same project.

Procedure

1. View the service account’s API token:

   $ oc describe secret <secret_name>

   For example:

   $ oc describe secret robot-token-uzkbh -n top-secret

   Example output

   Name:        robot-token-uzkbh
   Labels:        <none>
   Annotations:    kubernetes.io/service-account.name=robot,kubernetes.io/service-account.uid=49f19e2e-16c6-11e5-afdc-3c970e4b7ffe
   Type:    kubernetes.io/service-account-token
   Data
   token:    eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9...

2. Log in using the token that you obtained:

   $ oc login --token=eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9...

   Example output

   Logged into "https://server:8443" as "system:serviceaccount:top-secret:robot" using the token provided.
   You don't have any projects. You can try to create a new project, by running
       $ oc new-project <projectname>

3. Confirm that you logged in as the service account:

   $ oc whoami

   Example output

   system:serviceaccount:top-secret:robot