Book Image

Hands-on Kubernetes on Azure, Third Edition - Third Edition

By : Nills Franssens, Shivakumar Gopalakrishnan, Gunther Lenz
Book Image

Hands-on Kubernetes on Azure, Third Edition - Third Edition

By: Nills Franssens, Shivakumar Gopalakrishnan, Gunther Lenz

Overview of this book

Containers and Kubernetes containers facilitate cloud deployments and application development by enabling efficient versioning with improved security and portability. With updated chapters on role-based access control, pod identity, storing secrets, and network security in AKS, this third edition begins by introducing you to containers, Kubernetes, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and guides you through deploying an AKS cluster in different ways. You will then delve into the specifics of Kubernetes by deploying a sample guestbook application on AKS and installing complex Kubernetes apps using Helm. With the help of real-world examples, you'll also get to grips with scaling your applications and clusters. As you advance, you'll learn how to overcome common challenges in AKS and secure your applications with HTTPS. You will also learn how to secure your clusters and applications in a dedicated section on security. In the final section, you’ll learn about advanced integrations, which give you the ability to create Azure databases and run serverless functions on AKS as well as the ability to integrate AKS with a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline using GitHub Actions. By the end of this Kubernetes book, you will be proficient in deploying containerized workloads on Microsoft Azure with minimal management overhead.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Foreword
Free Chapter
2
Section 1: The Basics
5
Section 2: Deploying on AKS
11
Section 3: Securing your AKS cluster and workloads
16
Section 4: Integrating with Azure managed services
21
Index

9. Azure Active Directory pod-managed identities in AKS

In the previous chapter, Chapter 8, Role-based access control in AKS, you integrated your AKS cluster with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). You then assigned Kubernetes roles to users and groups in Azure AD. In this chapter, you will explore how you can integrate your applications running on AKS with Azure AD, and you will learn how you can give your pods an identity in Azure so they can interact with other Azure resources.

In Azure, application identities use a functionality called service principals. A service principal is the equivalent of a service account in the cloud. An application can use a service principal to authenticate to Azure AD and get access to resources. Those resources could be either Azure resources such as Azure Blob Storage or Azure Key Vault, or they could be applications that you developed that are integrated with Azure AD.

There are two ways to authenticate a service principal: you can...