Couchbase Resource RBAC

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      The Autonomous Operator manages many different types of Kubernetes custom resources, giving you the ability to control access to your Couchbase deployments based on which resource type each user should have access to.

      Overview

      Since CouchbaseCluster deployments are logical aggregations of other resource types, you can achieve fine grained access control using Kubernetes RBAC.

      Consider the following conceptual diagram:

      resources rbac
      Figure 1. Example resource type security model

      In Figure 1, an example security model with five different roles is depicted (Cluster Administrator, User Administrator, Data Scientist, XDCR Administrator, and Backup Administrator). These roles are arbitrary, and are simply an example of how a user might describe who in their organization would be allowed to modify a given resource type. For example, in the diagram above, the user has given a Backup Administrator the rights to modify CouchbaseBackup resources, and a XDCR Administrator the rights to modify CouchbaseReplication resources.

      Using the flexibility of Kubernetes RBAC, you can group access to resource types however you want. In the example above, the user’s organization might change to where a single individual is responsible for both backups and XDCR, in which case, that individual would need to be given access to both CouchbaseBackup and CouchbaseReplication resource types.

      Example Roles

      The following are some example roles that might help guide you in how to distribute access to different resource types:

      Role Description Potential Resource Types

      Cluster Administrator

      Responsible for the overall scaling and operation of the cluster. Cluster administrators ensure correct sizing during maintenance windows. They have the ability to explicitly select the resources that are managed by the cluster. They are also responsible for XDCR remote clusters (this requires a secret, so by limiting to the cluster administrator only, no other role has access to secrets, especially the cluster root account).

      CouchbaseCluster

      User Administrator

      Responsible for creating users, Couchbase roles, and binding the user/role to a bucket.

      CouchbaseUser, CouchbaseGroup, CouchbaseRoleBinding

      XDCR Administrator

      Responsible for the management of XDCR replications. XDCR administrators may audit required bandwidth, storage, etc. that may impact the network or a remote cluster.

      CouchbaseReplication

      Backup Administrator

      Responsible for the management of bucket backups. Backup administrators may audit storage requirements and other legislation related to data retention.

      CouchbaseBackup

      Data Scientist

      Responsible for creating buckets in order to process data. Provided that the necessary Couchbase RBAC rules are established beforehand, data scientists can essentially have access to a pseudo database-as-a-service.

      CouchbaseBucket, CouchbaseEphemeralBucket, CouchbaseMemcachedBucket