Least privilege for Kubernetes workloads

Usually, there will be a service account (default) associated with a Kubernetes workload. Thus, processes inside a pod can communicate with kube-apiserver using the service account token. DevOps should carefully grant necessary privileges to the service account for the purpose of least privilege. We've already covered this in the previous section.

Besides accessing kube-apiserver to operate Kubernetes objects, processes in a pod can also access resources on the worker nodes and other pods/microservices in the clusters (covered in Chapter 2, Kubernetes Networking). In this section, we will talk about the possible least privilege implementation of access to system resources, network resources, and application resources.

Least privilege for accessing system resources

Recall that a microservice running inside a container or pod is nothing but a process on a worker node isolated in its own namespace. A pod or container may access different...