Migrating from legacy access scopes

This page explains changes in access scopes for clusters running Kubernetes version 1.10 and higher. These changes only affect your clusters' interactions with Cloud Storage and Compute Engine.

What are access scopes?

Access scopes are the legacy method of specifying permissions for your nodes, and for workloads running on your nodes if the workloads are using application default credentials (ADC). In clusters running Kubernetes versions prior to 1.10, the cluster's default service account was granted a set of default access scopes. These clusters were granted the following access scopes by gcloud and Google Cloud console:

• compute-rw grants full access to all Compute Engine API methods.
• storage-ro grants read-only access to all Cloud Storage resources, including private images stored in Artifact Registry or Container Registry.

Changes in access scopes

Beginning with Kubernetes version 1.10, gcloud and Cloud console no longer grants the compute-rw access scope on new clusters and new node pools by default. Furthermore, if --scopes is specified in gcloud container create, gcloud no longer silently adds compute-rw or storage-ro.

These changes ensure that your default service account only has the permissions necessary to run your cluster, which improves the security of your project.

Note: If your gcloud configuration includes container/new_scopes_behavior true, this behavior is already enabled for all Kubernetes versions.

Are my workloads affected?

If your workloads do not require calling the APIs for which access is granted by these scopes, no action is required.

However, if your workloads require permission to interact with Compute Engine or Cloud Storage, your workloads might be affected. We recommend creating a custom service account with the equivalent Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles.

If you override the scopes and your workloads require permission to interact with Cloud Storage (including pulling private container images from Artifact Registry), the storage-ro scope must also be included.

Alternatively, to replicate the behavior of pre-1.10 clusters, see Reverting to legacy access scopes.

Impact

Compute Engine and Cloud Storage return 403 errors to applications running in Kubernetes 1.10 clusters that lack the necessary scopes.

Additionally, the response to a request with insufficient scopes includes an HTTP header detailing the necessary scopes. For example:

WWW-Authenticate: Bearer realm="https://accounts.google.com/", error=insufficient_scope, scope="https://www.googleapis.com/auth/compute.readonly"

Configuring a custom service account for workloads

IAM is the access control system for granting authorized roles to users and service accounts within your GCP project. A service account is a special Google account that performs tasks, such as deploying applications, on your behalf. You use IAM to create a service account, then use IAM policy bindings to secure the account.

If your workloads require access to Compute Engine, grant the service account the Compute Engine Admin role. If your workloads need to pull private images from Artifact Registry, see Configuring access control for Artifact Registry repositories.

Create a service account

To create a custom service account named kubernetes-engine-node-sa, run the following commands:

export NODE_SA_NAME=kubernetes-engine-node-sa
gcloud iam service-accounts create $NODE_SA_NAME \
  --display-name "GKE Node Service Account"
export NODE_SA_EMAIL=`gcloud iam service-accounts list --format='value(email)' \
  --filter='displayName:GKE Node Service Account'`

Note: These commands export two variables, $NODE_SA_NAME and $NODE_SA_EMAIL, that are used in commands documented later on this page.

Grant minimal roles

To configure the service account with the minimal necessary roles and permissions for your GKE node to function, run the following commands, where $PROJECT is your project ID:

export PROJECT=`gcloud config get-value project`
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding $PROJECT \
  --member serviceAccount:$NODE_SA_EMAIL \
  --role roles/monitoring.metricWriter
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding $PROJECT \
  --member serviceAccount:$NODE_SA_EMAIL \
  --role roles/monitoring.viewer
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding $PROJECT \
  --member serviceAccount:$NODE_SA_EMAIL \
  --role roles/logging.logWriter

Grant additional roles

Caution: The compute.admin role should not be granted to this service account unless necessary. Granting this role allows workloads to create, delete, read metadata on, and ssh into nodes, among other operations.

To grant the service account the Compute Engine Admin role, run the following command:

gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding $PROJECT \
  --member serviceAccount:$NODE_SA_EMAIL \
  --role roles/compute.admin

To learn how to grant service accounts access to private images stored in Artifact Registry, see Granting access to Google Kubernetes Engine clusters.

Creating a cluster or node pool with the custom service account

To create a cluster that uses the custom service account, run the following command:

gcloud container clusters create --service-account=$NODE_SA_EMAIL

To create a node pool in an existing cluster:

gcloud container node-pools create --service-account=$NODE_SA_EMAIL

Note: You can also find the service account's email address by running the following command:

gcloud iam service-accounts list --format='value(email)' \
      --filter='displayName:Node Service Account'

Reverting to legacy access scopes

If you want to continue using the legacy access scopes in clusters running Kubernetes version 1.10 and higher, you must add the scopes manually.

Console

To create a cluster using Cloud console:

1. Go to the Google Kubernetes Engine page in the Cloud console.

   Go to Google Kubernetes Engine

2. Click Create.

3. Configure your cluster as desired.

4. Under Control plane version, select either a Static version or a Release channel and version.

5. From the navigation pane, under Node Pools, expand default-pool and click Security.

6. In the Access scopes section, select Set access for each API.

7. For Compute Engine, select Read Write.

8. For Storage, select Read Only.

9. Click Create.

gcloud

To create a cluster, run the following command:

gcloud container clusters create example-cluster --scopes compute-rw,gke-default

To create a node pool in an existing cluster:

gcloud container node-pools create example-pool --scopes compute-rw,gke-default