Docker Cookbook

166 | Chapter 5: Kubernetes

---

See Also
• Secure access to the API 
server
• Accessing a 
cluster
• Authentication 
plug-ins
• Authorization 
roadmap
5.16 Configuring the Kubernetes Client to Access Remote
Clusters
Problem
You are exposing the API server securely by using an authentication mechanism and
you would like your users to access the cluster remotely by using one of the clients
(e.g., 
kubectl
).
Solution
Use 
kubectl
configuration to create multiple contexts for accessing your clusters. In
each context, specify the cluster API endpoint and the user credentials.
Indeed, 
kubectl
by default communicates with an API server on localhost. But you
can define multiple endpoints (useful if using multiple clusters in different regions,
for instance) and multiple user profiles (e.g., production, development, service) that
may have different authorization policies. The first time you install 
kubectl
, your
configuration will be empty. Run 
kubectl config view
to verify it as shown here:
$ ./kubectl config view
apiVersion: v1
clusters: []
contexts: []
current-context: ""
kind: Config
preferences: {}
users: []
You can use multiple options to define a cluster, a context, and some user credentials.
The following is an example of setting up a cluster named 
k
, defined by an HTTPS
endpoint with a self-signed certificate; a context 
kcon
is created that uses cluster 
k
and
user 
superfoobar
. The 
superadmin
user has a set of credentials that were set up in
Recipe 5.15
. At the end of the example, you set the current context: 
use-context
.
This has the intended results that you can use 
kubectl
and that it will properly form