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Version: v4.1

Deploy sidecar with a pre-created service account

When the sidecar is deployed, it creates a role to access some of the Kubernetes APIs. You may wish to retain control over roles and role binding, and you may wish to do this outside of your Helm charts. You can accomplish this by deploying the sidecar using external service accounts. Below, we explain how to do this.

  1. Create the service account: You can deploy the Cyral sidecar using a Kubernetes service account that you create and manage. Here, we'll create a service account. In this command,

    • SIDECAR_NAMESPACE is the Kubernetes namespace where the Cyral sidecar cluster will run
    • SIDECAR_SA is the Kubernetes service account that will deploy and run the Cyral sidecar cluster
    kubectl create sa -n $SIDECAR_NAMESPACE $SIDECAR_SA
  2. Create the roles and role bindings: The Cyral sidecar requires 3 separate roles:

    • a role for the sidecar exporter (service that sends sidecar health metrics to the Cyral management console),
    • a role for the sidecar’s Filebeat logging agent that sends log data to services such as ELK, and
    • a role for accessing the Kubernetes secret with credentials needed to access the Cyral control plane.

    Follow the examples below, replacing the names in angle brackets with names suitable for your environment:

    kubectl create role <ROLE FOR EXPORTER> --verb=get --resource=services -n $SIDECAR_NAMESPACE

    kubectl create role <ROLE FOR FILEBEAT> --verb=get,watch,list --resource=pods -n $SIDECAR_NAMESPACE

    kubectl create role <ROLE FOR SECRETS> --verb=get,watch,patch --resource=secrets -n $SIDECAR_NAMESPACE

    Bind the roles to the service account:

    kubectl create rolebinding <BINDING FOR EXPORTER> --role=<ROLE FOR EXPORTER> --serviceaccount=$SIDECAR_NAMESPACE:$SIDECAR_SA --namespace $SIDECAR_NAMESPACE

    kubectl create rolebinding <BINDING FOR FILEBEAT> --role=<ROLE FOR FILEBEAT> --serviceaccount=$SIDECAR_NAMESPACE:$SIDECAR_SA --namespace $SIDECAR_NAMESPACE

    kubectl create rolebinding <BINDING FOR SECRETS ROLE> --role=<ROLE FOR SECRETS> --serviceaccount=$SIDECAR_NAMESPACE:$SIDECAR_SA --namespace $SIDECAR_NAMESPACE
  3. Modify the values.yaml file: The downloaded values.yaml files need to be modified to use the above-created service account. Note that rbac.create must be set to false:

     rbac:
    serviceAccount:
    name: $SIDECAR_SA
    create: false