What's a Role?

In Kubernetes, a Role is a way to tie together permissions into an object that can be described and configured. Roles have rules, which are a collection of resources and verbs. Working backward, we have the following:

• Verbs: The actions that can be taken on an API, such as reading (get), writing (create, update, patch, and delete), or listing and watching.
• Resources: Names of APIs to apply the verbs to, such as services, endpoints, and so on. Specific sub-resources may be listed as well. Specific resources can be named to provide very specific permissions on an object.

A Role does not say who can perform the verbs on the resources—that is handled by RoleBindings and ClusterRoleBindings. We will learn more about these in the RoleBindings and ClusterRoleBindings section.

Important Note

The term "role" can have multiple meanings, and RBAC is often used in other contexts. In the enterprise world, the term "role" is...