Hi!

Kubelogin is a client-go credential plugin that implements Azure AD authentication. Kubernetes and its CLI, kubectl, are written in Go and client-go is a package or library that allows you to talk to Kubernetes from the Go language. Client-go supports credentials plugins to integrate with authentication protocols that are not supported by default by kubectl.

Even with an AAD managed AKS cluster, kubelogin allows us to do non-interactive login using a Service Principal or in the latest release — even using the Azure CLI token making it really ideal to use in CI/CD scenarios.

Create a service principal or use an existing one.

az ad sp create-for-rbac --skip-assignment --name myAKSAutomationServicePrincipal

The output is similar to the following example.

{
  "appId": "<spn client id>",
  "displayName": "myAKSAutomationServicePrincipal",
  "name": "http://myAKSAutomationServicePrincipal",
  "password": "<spn secret>",
  "tenant": "<aad tenant id>"
}

Query your service principal AAD Object ID by using the command below.

az ad sp show --id <spn client id> --query "objectId"

To configure the role binding on Azure Kubernetes Service, the user in rolebinding should be the AAD Object ID.

For example,

apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
  name: sp-role-binding
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: cluster-admin
subjects:
  - apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
    kind: User
    name: <service-principal-object-id>

Use Kubelogin to convert your kubeconfig

export KUBECONFIG=/path/to/kubeconfig

kubelogin convert-kubeconfig -l spn

export AAD_SERVICE_PRINCIPAL_CLIENT_ID=<spn client id>
export AAD_SERVICE_PRINCIPAL_CLIENT_SECRET=<spn secret>

kubectl get nodes

https://github.com/Azure/kubelogin

Maxime.