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RFC-0001 Flux Multi-Tenancy

Summary

The main goal of this RFC is to define the Kubernetes tenancy models supported by Flux.

Motivation

As of Flux v0.23.0, the documentation contains references to account impersonation, reconciliation isolation and other multi-tenancy related features without clearly defining which tenancy models are supported by Flux and how they relate to source access control and Kubernetes role-based access control.

Goals

  • Define multi-tenancy from a Flux user perspective.
  • List the types of users that interact with Flux in regard to multi-tenancy.
  • List the tenancy models supported by Flux.
  • Explain the differences between tenancy models.

Non-Goals

  • Explain in detail the Kubernetes architecture in regard to multi-tenancy.
  • Provide an end-to-end workflow of how to setup multi-tenancy with Flux.

Introduction

Flux allows different organizations and/or teams to share the same Kubernetes control plane to deliver applications in a GitOps manner. Flux enables segmentation and isolation of resources across tenants by leveraging Kubernetes Cluster API, namespaces and role-based access control.

User Roles

There are two types of users that interact with Flux: platform admins and tenants. Besides installing Flux, all the other operations (deploy applications, configure ingress, policies, etc) do not require users to have direct access to the Kubernetes API. Flux acts as a proxy between users and the Kubernetes API, using Git as source of truth for the cluster desired state. Changes to the clusters and workloads configuration can be made in a collaborative manner, where the various teams responsible for the delivery process propose, review and approve changes via pull request workflows.

Platform Admins

The platform admins have unrestricted access to Kubernetes API. They are responsible for installing Flux and granting Flux access to the sources (Git, Helm, OCI repositories) that make up the cluster(s) control plane desired state. The repository(s) owned by the platform admins are reconciled on the cluster(s) by Flux, under the cluster-admin Kubernetes cluster role.

Example of operations performed by cluster admins:

  • Bootstrap Flux onto cluster(s).
  • Extend the Kubernetes API with custom resource definitions and validation webhooks.
  • Configure various controllers for ingress, storage, logging, monitoring, progressive delivery, etc.
  • Set up namespaces for tenants and define their level of access with Kubernetes RBAC.
  • Onboard tenants by registering their Git repositories with Flux.

Tenants

The tenants have restricted access to the cluster(s) according to the Kubernetes RBAC configured by the platform admins. The repositories owned by tenants are reconciled on the cluster(s) by Flux, under the Kubernetes account(s) assigned by platform admins.

Example of operations performed by tenants:

  • Register their sources with Flux (GitRepositories, HelmRepositories and Buckets).
  • Deploy workload(s) into their namespace(s) using Flux custom resources (Kustomizations and HelmReleases).
  • Automate application updates using Flux custom resources (ImageRepositories, ImagePolicies and ImageUpdateAutomations).
  • Configure the release pipeline(s) using Flagger custom resources (Canaries and MetricsTemplates).
  • Setup webhooks and alerting for their release pipeline(s) using Flux custom resources (Receivers and Alerts).

Tenancy Models

The Kubernetes tenancy models supported by Flux are: soft multi-tenancy and hard multi-tenancy.

For an overview of the Kubernetes multi-tenant architecture please consult the following documentation:

Soft Multi-Tenancy

With soft multi-tenancy, the platform admins use Kubernetes constructs such as namespaces, accounts, roles and role bindings to create a logical separation between tenants.

When Flux deploys workloads from a repository belonging to a tenant, it uses the Kubernetes account assigned to that tenant to perform the git-to-cluster reconciliation. By leveraging Kubernetes RBAC, Flux can ensure that the operations performed by tenants are restricted to their namespaces.

Note that with this model, tenants share cluster-wide resources such as ClusterRoles, CustomResourceDefinitions, IngressClasses, StorageClasses, and they cannot create or alter these resources. If a tenant adds a cluster-scoped resource definition to their repository, Flux will fail the git-to-cluster reconciliation due to Kubernetes RBAC restrictions.

To restrict the reconciliation of tenant's sources, a Kubernetes service account name can be specified in Flux Kustomizations and HelmReleases under .spec.serviceAccountName. Please consult the Flux
documentation for more details:

Note that with soft multi-tenancy, true tenant isolation requires security measures beyond Kubernetes RBAC. Please refer to the Kubernetes security considerations documentation for more details on how to harden shared clusters.

Tenants Onboarding

When onboarding tenants, platform admins have the option to assign namespaces, set permissions and register the tenants main repositories onto clusters in a declarative manner.

The Flux CLI offers an easy way of generating all the Kubernetes manifests needed to onboard tenants:

  • flux create tenant command generates namespaces, service accounts and Kubernetes RBAC with restricted access to the cluster resources, given tenants access only to their namespaces.
  • flux create secret git command generates SSH keys used by Flux to clone the tenants repositories.
  • flux create source git command generates the configuration that tells Flux which repositories belong to tenants.
  • flux create kustomization command generates the configuration that tells Flux how to reconcile the manifests found in the tenants repositories.

All the above commands have an --export flag for generating the Kubernetes resources in YAML format. The platform admins should place the generated manifests in the repository that defines the cluster(s) desired state.

Here is an example of the generated manifests:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
  name: tenant1
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name: flux
  namespace: tenant1
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: RoleBinding
metadata:
  name: flux
  namespace: tenant1
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: cluster-admin
subjects:
  - kind: ServiceAccount
    name: flux
    namespace: tenant1
---
apiVersion: source.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1beta1
kind: GitRepository
metadata:
  name: tenant1
  namespace: tenant1
spec:
  interval: 5m0s
  ref:
    branch: main
  secretRef:
    name: tenant1-git-auth
  url: ssh://git@github.com/org/tenant1
---
apiVersion: kustomize.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1beta2
kind: Kustomization
metadata:
  name: tenant1
  namespace: tenant1
spec:
  interval: 10m0s
  path: ./
  prune: true
  serviceAccountName: flux
  sourceRef:
    kind: GitRepository
    name: tenant1

Note that the cluster-admin role is used in a RoleBinding, this only gives full control over every resource in the role binding's namespace.

Once the tenants main repositories are registered on the cluster(s), the tenants can configure their app delivery in Git using Kubernetes namespace-scoped resources such as Deployments, Services, Flagger Canaries, Flux GitRepositories, Kustomizations, HelmRepositories, HelmReleases, ImageUpdateAutomations, Alerts, Receivers, etc.

Caveats

As of v0.23.0, Flux does not enforce a service account to be specified on Flux Kustomizations and HelmReleases. When a service account is not specified, Flux defaults to cluster-admin. In order to enforce the tenant isolation, an admission controller such as Kyverno or OPA Gatekeeper must be used to make the .spec.serviceAccountName a required field for the Flux custom resources created by tenants.

We provide an example for enforcing service accounts using a Kyverno cluster policy.

As of v0.23.0, Flux allows for Kustomizations and HelmReleases to reference sources (GitRepositories, HelmRepositories and Buckets) across namespaces. In order to prevent tenants from accessing each other sources, an admission controller such as Kyverno or OPA Gatekeeper must be used to block cross-namespace references.

We provide an example for blocking source cross-namespace references using a Kyverno cluster policy.

Hard Multi-Tenancy

With hard multi-tenancy, the platform admins use Kubernetes Cluster API to create dedicated clusters for each tenant. The Flux instance installed on the management cluster is responsible for reconciling the cluster definitions belonging to tenants.

To enable GitOps for the tenant's clusters, the platform admins can configure the Flux instance running on the management cluster to connect to the tenant's cluster using the kubeConfig generated by the Cluster API provider.

To configure Flux reconciliation of remote clusters, a Kubernetes secret containing a kubeConfig can be specified in Flux Kustomizations and HelmReleases under .spec.kubeConfig.secretRef. Please consult the Flux API documentation for more details:

Note that with hard multi-tenancy, tenants have full access to cluster-wide resources, so they have the option to manage Flux independently of platform admins, by deploying a Flux instance on each cluster.

Caveats

When using a Kubernetes Cluster API provider, the kubeConfig secret is automatically generated and Flux can make use of it without any manual actions. For clusters created by other means than Cluster API, the platform team has to create the kubeConfig secrets to allow Flux access to the remote clusters.

As of Flux v0.23.0, we don't provide any guidance for cluster admins on how to generate the kubeConfig secrets.

Implementation History

  • Soft multi-tenancy based on service account impersonation was first released in flux2 v0.0.1.
  • Generating namespaces and RBAC for defining tenants with flux create tenant was first released in flux2 v0.1.0.
  • Hard multi-tenancy based on remote cluster reconciliation was first released in flux2 v0.2.0.
  • Soft multi-tenancy end-to-end workflow example was first published on 27 Nov 2020 at fluxcd/flux2-multi-tenancy.
  • Soft multi-tenancy CVE-2021-41254 "Privilege escalation to cluster admin on multi-tenant environments" was fixed in flux2 v0.15.0.