Upbound RBAC

Standard Plan Feature

This feature is available in the Standard Plan and above. For more information, see our pricing plans or contact our sales team.

This guide provides an overview of role-based access control (RBAC) in Upbound. RBAC lets you control access to your Upbound resources and control planes based on the roles of individual users in your organization.

tip

To learn how to manage access to resources in a control plane, read the documentation on authorizing actions on resources in control planes

Enable Upbound RBAC

tip

This section only applies to administrators who've deployed a self-hosted Space.

For administrators who have deployed self-hosted Spaces, you can enable Upbound RBAC at install or upgrade time. Configure the feature in the Spaces helm chart:

--set "features.alpha.upboundRBAC.enabled=true"

Upbound RBAC is enabled by default in Upbound Cloud Spaces.

Authorize access to control plane group resources

Roles

Upbound RBAC roles define sets of permissions with three built-in roles at the group level:

• Admin
• Editor
• Viewer

These roles apply at three levels:

• Organization
• Control Plane Groups
• Control Planes

Review the table for permissions for each role:

CONTROLPLANE ROLES	VIEWER	EDITOR	CONTROLLER	ADMIN
whoami, can-i, and discover APIs	Read	Read	Read	Read
Namespaces	Read	Read	Create + Read	CRUD
Events	Read	Read	CRUD	CRUD
Secrets Connection Details	Read	CRUD	CRUD	CRUD
*.crossplane.io APIs	Read	CRUD	CRUD	CRUD
MRs, Compositions, Claims	Read	CRUD	CRUD	CRUD
ConfigMaps	✗	CRUD	CRUD	CRUD
External Secrets Operator (ESO) APIs	Read	Read*	Read*	CRUD
CRDs	Read	Read	Read	Read + Update
Pods	✗	Read + Delete	✗	Read + Delete
Deployments	✗	Read	✗	Read
ReplicaSets	✗	Read	✗	Read
ControllerRevisions	Read	CRUD	CRUD	CRUD
Services	✗	Read	✗	Read
Webhook Configurations	✗	Read	✗	Read
ValidatingAdmissionPolicies	✗	Read	✗	Read
Leases	✗	✗	CRUD	CRUD
ClusterRoles	✗	✗	✗	CRUD
ClusterRoleBindings	✗	✗	✗	CRUD
Roles	✗	✗	✗	CRUD
RoleBindings	✗	✗	✗	CRUD
ServiceAccounts	✗	✗	✗	CRUD

note

Editor and Controller lack Read permissions on quayaccesstokens, stssessiontokens ESO generator types.

View group role permissions

Console

1. On the Control Planes screen in the Console, select which Space and group context you wish to be in.
2. Select the Settings pane of the control plane group.
3. In the Team access card of the settings page, view the teams and their permissions for this group.

Space API

Use the up CLI to set your kubecontext to the desired Space, then run the following:

kubectl get objectrolebindings    
NAME            AGE
default-zcntk   14s

Each role permission granted to a team gets represented with an objectrolebinding Space API resource.

Assign group role permissions

Console

1. On the Control Planes screen in the Console, select which Space and group context you wish to be in.
2. Select the Settings pane of the control plane group view.
3. Select Add Teams
4. Select which role you wish to grant.
5. Select which teams you wish to apply the role to, then select the Add Selected to Group button.

Space API

Use the up CLI to set your kubecontext to the desired Space, then create an objectrolebinding. The example below gives control plane group editor access to the UpboundTeam with the UUID of 918a6338-abbe-420d-81cf-9e87642a87c6:

apiVersion: authorization.spaces.upbound.io/v1alpha1
kind: ObjectRoleBinding
metadata:
  name: my-binding
  namespace: ctp-group-1
spec:
  object:
    apiGroup: core
    resource: namespaces
    name: ctp-group-1
  subjects:
  - kind: UpboundTeam
    name: 918a6338-abbe-420d-81cf-9e87642a87c6
    role: editor

Delete group role permissions

Console

1. On the Control Planes screen in the Console, select which Space and group context you wish to be in.
2. Select the Settings pane of the control plane group view.
3. Select the settings button on the right side the team you wish to delete.
4. Select Remove

Space API

Use the up CLI to set your kubecontext to the desired Space, then delete the desired objectrolebinding. The example below deletes the permission created in the previous section:

kubectl delete objectrolebinding default-zcntk                        
objectrolebinding.authorization.spaces.upbound.io "default-zcntk" deleted