Introduction

Last week, the Istio community held its 2021 IstioCon, which I found to be really enjoyable and worthwhile. It helped me learn more about the people that develop and use Istio, gave me insight into what the development goals and motivations for the project are, and encouraged me to dive deeper into what Istio is capable of.

Introduction

Recently I’ve been experimenting with creating users with the Kubernetes API and have even created a module called kubernetes-user. While the subject of Kubernetes users is a complicated one, this Python module explores different methods to authenticate with the Kubernetes API.

One such method for authenticating with the API is through Kubernetes Service Account (SA) tokens. Basically, Kubernetes automatically associates a secret token with each Service Account. These tokens exist as a Kubernetes Secret and reside in the same namespace as the SA. A SA definition references the secret it is associated with.

This article demonstrates how you can find these tokens and use them for authenticating with the Kubernetes API.

The Istio community has been in the process of changing its install procedure for a number of releases. As of Istio 1.6, the IstioOperator has graduated to stable, and is one of the preferred install methods. The documentation for the IstioOperator left me with a lot of questions, so I am writing here to try to brain dump what I have found out about how it works.