AWS EKS — Security Best Practices

Kubernetes Components

When you deploy Kubernetes, you get a cluster.

A Kubernetes cluster consists of a set of worker machines, called nodes, that run containerized applications. Every cluster has at least one worker node.

The worker node(s) host the Pods that are the components of the application workload. The control plane manages the worker nodes and the Pods in the cluster. In production environments, the control plane usually runs across multiple computers and a cluster usually runs multiple nodes, providing fault-tolerance and high availability.

*pods is a set of running containers

RBAC vs ABAC

While RBAC relies on pre-defined roles, ABAC is more dynamic and uses relation-based access control. You can use RBAC to determine access controls with broad strokes, while ABAC offers more granularity. For example, an RBAC system grants access to all managers, but an ABAC policy will only grant access to managers that are in the financial department. ABAC executes a more complex search, which requires more processing power and time, so you should only resort to ABAC when RBAC is insufficient.