Capsule

Getting started

Thanks for giving Capsule a try.

Installation

Make sure you have access to a Kubernetes cluster as administrator.

There are two ways to install Capsule:

Install with the single YAML file installer

Ensure you have kubectl installed in your PATH. Clone this repository and move to the repo folder:

$ kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/clastix/capsule/master/config/install.yaml

It will install the Capsule controller in a dedicated namespace capsule-system.

Install with Helm Chart

Please, refer to the instructions reported in the Capsule Helm Chart README.

Create your first Tenant

In Capsule, a Tenant is an abstraction to group multiple namespaces in a single entity within a set of boundaries defined by the Cluster Administrator. The tenant is then assigned to a user or group of users who is called Tenant Owner.

Capsule defines a Tenant as Custom Resource with cluster scope.

Create the tenant as cluster admin:

kubectl create -f - << EOF
apiVersion: capsule.clastix.io/v1beta1
kind: Tenant
metadata:
  name: oil
spec:
  owners:
  - name: alice
    kind: User
EOF

You can check the tenant just created

$ kubectl get tenants
NAME   STATE    NAMESPACE QUOTA   NAMESPACE COUNT   NODE SELECTOR   AGE
oil    Active                     0                                 10s

Tenant owners

Each tenant comes with a delegated user or group of users acting as the tenant admin. In the Capsule jargon, this is called the Tenant Owner. Other users can operate inside a tenant with different levels of permissions and authorizations assigned directly by the Tenant Owner.

Capsule does not care about the authentication strategy used in the cluster and all the Kubernetes methods of authentication are supported. The only requirement to use Capsule is to assign tenant users to the group defined by --capsule-user-group option, which defaults to capsule.clastix.io.

Assignment to a group depends on the authentication strategy in your cluster.

For example, if you are using capsule.clastix.io, users authenticated through a X.509 certificate must have capsule.clastix.io as Organization: -subj "/CN=${USER}/O=capsule.clastix.io"

Users authenticated through an OIDC token must have in their token:

...
"users_groups": [
  "capsule.clastix.io",
  "other_group"
]

The hack/create-user.sh can help you set up a dummy kubeconfig for the alice user acting as owner of a tenant called oil

./hack/create-user.sh alice oil
...
certificatesigningrequest.certificates.k8s.io/alice-oil created
certificatesigningrequest.certificates.k8s.io/alice-oil approved
kubeconfig file is: alice-oil.kubeconfig
to use it as alice export KUBECONFIG=alice-oil.kubeconfig

Log as tenant owner

$ export KUBECONFIG=alice-oil.kubeconfig

and create a couple of new namespaces

$ kubectl create namespace oil-production
$ kubectl create namespace oil-development

As user alice you can operate with fully admin permissions:

$ kubectl -n oil-development run nginx --image=docker.io/nginx 
$ kubectl -n oil-development get pods

but limited to only your namespaces:

$ kubectl -n kube-system get pods
Error from server (Forbidden): pods is forbidden: User "alice" cannot list resource "pods" in API group "" in the namespace "kube-system"

What’s next

The Tenant Owners have full administrative permissions limited to only the namespaces in the assigned tenant. However, their permissions can be controlled by the Cluster Admin by setting rules and policies on the assigned tenant. See the use cases page for more getting more cool things you can do with Capsule.