Cluster authentication - Amazon EKS

Cluster authentication

Amazon EKS uses IAM to provide authentication to your Kubernetes cluster (through the aws eks get-token command, available in version 1.16.156 or later of the AWS CLI, or the AWS IAM Authenticator for Kubernetes), but it still relies on native Kubernetes Role Based Access Control (RBAC) for authorization. This means that IAM is only used for authentication of valid IAM entities. All permissions for interacting with your Amazon EKS cluster's Kubernetes API is managed through the native Kubernetes RBAC system. The following picture shows this relationship.


            Amazon EKS and IAM integration
Note

Amazon EKS uses the authentication token to make the sts:GetCallerIdentity call. As a result, AWS CloudTrail events with the name GetCallerIdentity from the source sts.amazonaws.com can have Amazon EKS service IP addresses for their source IP address.