Help improve this page
Want to contribute to this user guide? Scroll to the bottom of this page and select Edit this page on GitHub. Your contributions will help make our user guide better for everyone.
How Amazon EKS works with IAM
Before you use IAM to manage access to Amazon EKS, you should understand what IAM features are available to use with Amazon EKS. To get a high-level view of how Amazon EKS and other AWS services work with IAM, see AWS services that work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.
Topics
Amazon EKS identity-based policies
With IAM identity-based policies, you can specify allowed or denied actions and resources as well as the conditions under which actions are allowed or denied. Amazon EKS supports specific actions, resources, and condition keys. To learn about all of the elements that you use in a JSON policy, see IAM JSON policy elements reference in the IAM User Guide.
Actions
Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.
The Action element of a JSON policy describes the actions that you can use to allow or deny access in a policy. Policy actions usually have the same name as the associated AWS API operation. There are some exceptions, such as permission-only actions that don’t have a matching API operation. There are also some operations that require multiple actions in a policy. These additional actions are called dependent actions.
Include actions in a policy to grant permissions to perform the associated operation.
Policy actions in Amazon EKS use the following prefix before the action: eks:. For example, to grant someone permission to get descriptive information about an Amazon EKS cluster, you include the DescribeCluster action in their policy. Policy statements must include either an Action or NotAction element.
To specify multiple actions in a single statement, separate them with commas as follows:
"Action": ["eks:action1", "eks:action2"]
You can specify multiple actions using wildcards (*). For example, to specify all actions that begin with the word Describe, include the following action:
"Action": "eks:Describe*"
To see a list of Amazon EKS actions, see Actions defined by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service in the Service Authorization Reference.
Resources
Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.
The Resource JSON policy element specifies the object or objects to which the action applies. Statements must include either a Resource or a NotResource element. As a best practice, specify a resource using its Amazon Resource Name (ARN). You can do this for actions that support a specific resource type, known as resource-level permissions.
For actions that don’t support resource-level permissions, such as listing operations, use a wildcard (*) to indicate that the statement applies to all resources.
"Resource": "*"
The Amazon EKS cluster resource has the following ARN.
arn:aws:eks:region-code:account-id:cluster/cluster-name
For more information about the format of ARNs, see Amazon resource names (ARNs) and AWS service namespaces.
For example, to specify the cluster with the name my-cluster in your statement, use the following ARN:
"Resource": "arn:aws:eks:region-code:111122223333:cluster/my-cluster"
To specify all clusters that belong to a specific account and AWS Region, use the wildcard (*):
"Resource": "arn:aws:eks:region-code:111122223333:cluster/*"
Some Amazon EKS actions, such as those for creating resources, can’t be performed on a specific resource. In those cases, you must use the wildcard (*).
"Resource": "*"
To see a list of Amazon EKS resource types and their ARNs, see Resources defined by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service in the Service Authorization Reference. To learn with which actions you can specify the ARN of each resource, see Actions defined by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service.
Condition keys
Amazon EKS defines its own set of condition keys and also supports using some global condition keys. To see all AWS global condition keys, see AWS Global Condition Context Keys in the IAM User Guide.
You can set condition keys when associating an OpenID Connect provider to your cluster. For more information, see Example IAM policy.
All Amazon EC2 actions support the aws:RequestedRegion and ec2:Region condition keys. For more information, see Example: Restricting Access to a Specific AWS Region.
For a list of Amazon EKS condition keys, see Conditions defined by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service in the Service Authorization Reference. To learn which actions and resources you can use a condition key with, see Actions defined by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service.
Examples
To view examples of Amazon EKS identity-based policies, see Amazon EKS identity-based policy examples.
When you create an Amazon EKS cluster, the IAM principal that creates the cluster is automatically granted system:masters permissions in the cluster’s role-based access control (RBAC) configuration in the Amazon EKS control plane. This principal doesn’t appear in any visible configuration, so make sure to keep track of which principal originally created the cluster. To grant additional IAM principals the ability to interact with your cluster, edit the aws-auth ConfigMap within Kubernetes and create a Kubernetes
rolebinding or clusterrolebinding with the name of a group that you specify in the aws-auth ConfigMap.
For more information about working with the ConfigMap, see Grant IAM users and roles access to Kubernetes APIs.
Amazon EKS resource-based policies
Amazon EKS does not support resource-based policies.
Authorization based on Amazon EKS tags
You can attach tags to Amazon EKS resources or pass tags in a request to Amazon EKS. To control access based on tags, you provide tag information in the condition element of a policy using the aws:ResourceTag/, key-name
aws:RequestTag/, or key-name
aws:TagKeys condition keys. For more information about tagging Amazon EKS resources, see Organize Amazon EKS resources with tags. For more information about which actions that you can use tags in condition keys with, see Actions defined by Amazon EKS in the Service Authorization Reference.
Amazon EKS IAM roles
An IAM role is an entity within your AWS account that has specific permissions.
Using temporary credentials with Amazon EKS
You can use temporary credentials to sign in with federation, assume an IAM role, or to assume a cross-account role. You obtain temporary security credentials by calling AWS STS API operations such as AssumeRole or GetFederationToken.
Amazon EKS supports using temporary credentials.
Service-linked roles
link:IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_roles.html#iam-term-service-linked-role[Service-linked roles,type="documentation"] allow {aws} services to access resources in other services to complete an action on your behalf. Service-linked roles appear in your IAM account and are owned by the service. An administrator can view but can't edit the permissions for service-linked roles.
Amazon EKS supports service-linked roles. For details about creating or managing Amazon EKS service-linked roles, see Using service-linked roles for Amazon EKS.
Service roles
This feature allows a service to assume a service role on your behalf. This role allows the service to access resources in other services to complete an action on your behalf. Service roles appear in your IAM account and are owned by the account. This means that an IAM administrator can change the permissions for this role. However, doing so might break the functionality of the service.
Amazon EKS supports service roles. For more information, see Amazon EKS cluster IAM role and Amazon EKS node IAM role.
Choosing an IAM role in Amazon EKS
When you create a cluster resource in Amazon EKS, you must choose a role to allow Amazon EKS to access several other AWS resources on your behalf. If you have previously created a service role, then Amazon EKS provides you with a list of roles to choose from. It’s important to choose a role that has the Amazon EKS managed policies attached to it. For more information, see Check for an existing cluster role and Check for an existing node role.
