RBAC
Role-based access control (RBAC) is an Enterprise feature.
Overview
The Conduktor RBAC system enables you to restrict access to resources and enforce permissions at User and Group granularity. This is a critical step in ensuring that you have control over your Apache Kafka data.
With RBAC enabled, it's possible to:
- Configure access to Conduktor services
- Configure global permissions across multiple clusters
- Administer permissions for Kafka resources:
- Topics
- Consumer Groups
- Clusters
- Subjects
- Connects
Jump to:
Enable RBAC in your Organization
By default, RBAC is disabled within your organization, meaning that everyone has access to everything and permissions are not taken into account. Assuming you are an Administrator, you can enable this via the Settings tab of Admin. That way, people without any permissions won't see anything, except if they have permissions.
RBAC in Console since 1.17.0
How to assign permissions?
You can assign two kinds of permissions:
- Services permissions: to see and/or manage Conduktor Console services
- Resources permissions: to interact with Kafka resources
And you can assign those permissions to:
- Users
- Groups
To do so, you can either click on the name of the user/group, or click on the ...
icon on the right of their name, like shown below.
Please note that permissions are additive, meaning that if a user belongs to multiple groups, they will inherit all the permissions given to these groups. If they have a restricted access to a topic, but belong to a group that has a full access, then they will have a full access too.
Manage Services Permissions
Since 1.17.0, you are able to restrict access to Conduktor Console services. The default set of permissions is the one below:
This set of permissions means that the user will have this view of the Admin
section (note the available tabs on the left):
If you check all the boxes, the user will have this view of the Admin
section (access to additional settings):
Finally, if you remove their access to Data Masking and/or Topic as a Service, they will still see the modules, but won't be able to access them. Here is an example for Topic as a Service:
Manage Resources Permissions
Granular Permissions
Since 1.17.0, the RBAC model is much more granular and allows you to go deep into the permissions. Here is a table that recaps the ones you can assign:
Resource | Permissions |
---|---|
Topics | View config |
Topics | Consume |
Topics | Produce |
Topics | Create |
Topics | Delete |
Topics | Empty |
Topics | Add partitions |
Consumer groups | Viewer |
Consumer groups | Reset |
Consumer groups | Create |
Consumer groups | Delete |
Subjects | View |
Subjects | Edit compatibility |
Subjects | Create / Update |
Subjects | Delete |
Kafka connectors | View task & status |
Kafka connectors | View config |
Kafka connectors | Edit config |
Kafka connectors | Deploy |
Kafka connectors | Delete |
Kafka connectors | Restart |
Kafka connectors | Pause / Resume |
Clusters | View ACL |
Clusters | Manage ACL |
Clusters | View broker |
Clusters | Edit broker |
Clusters | Edit SR compatibility |
All these permissions can be applied on one specific cluster, or all your clusters.
Prefixes
When you define a permission, you might want it to be applied to:
- A specific topic, by typing
my-topic
for instance - All the topics, by using a wildcard
*
- A subset that starts with a certain prefix, by typing
my-prefix-*
Here is an example of those three cases within the UI:
The exact same works for other Kafka resources.
Quick Select
In order to win some time during the permissions creation, you can use the Quick select
to give a default set of permissions.
The screenshots below show the different Quick select
sets of permissions depending on the resource.
For the
Clusters
permissions, the first set is for Viewer
, and the second one is for Admin
.
If the Quick select
doesn't fit your need, you can still Select permissions manually
by checking the exact boxes you need.
Example
Here is an example of a set of permissions given to Alice:
We can see that this is a recap of all the permissions this user has.
In blue, we have the permissions Alice inherits from the group Project A
, and in white the ones that are assigned to her directly.
This set of permissions gives her:
- A full access to the topic
alice-private-topic
and to the consumer groupalice-consumers
, on the clusterLocal Kafka
- Some actions on all the topics and consumer groups that start with the prefix
app-a-
, on all the clusters, that she inherits from the groupProject A
RBAC Before 1.17.0
Roles
There are currently four hard-coded roles in Conduktor. More granular roles and support for custom roles is coming soon, please contact us to discuss your needs.
Below outlines what these roles permit when RBAC is enabled. You should combine roles with resource conditions to bind permisisons sets to specific resources.
Role | Description |
---|---|
Admin | Platform Admin has super user access and no restrictions in regards to platform actions or kafka resources. |
Member | Platform Member has read-only access in regards to platform entities such as roles, groups, users and settings. By default, a member has no Kafka resource access. This must be granted explicitly through the Editor and Viewer roles. |
Editor | Editor role provides 'global' edit permissions on all Kafka resources such as consumer groups, kafka connect, ACLs, topics and subjects. Add resource conditions to this role to provide edit permissions on Kafka resources. |
Viewer | Viewer role provides 'global' read-only permissions on all Kafka resources such as consumer groups, kafka connect, ACLs, topics and subjects. Add resource conditions to this role to provide read-only permissions on Kafka resources. |
Manage Resource Conditions
Resource conditions are used to grant access to resources according to the permissions that the role assumes. Resource conditions can be applied to:
- Users
- Groups
From the Members screen in Admin, select the breadcrumb next to either a user or a group. From the dropdown menu, choose manage permissions.
Example: Assigning Topic Permissions
The below example demonstrates how to apply Editor role permissions on Topic resources.
From the permissions screen, you should bind resources to the relevant role. The example below demonstrates how to:
- Provide Editor role permissions
- On all Topic resources in Cluster 'Upstash'
- Where the topic names are prefixed:
sales.ecommerce.*
Note you can use a wildcard to ensure access is permitted to all topic names within the same domain or context.
Resource Permissions
The Editor/Viewer roles dictate different permissions for specific resources:
Resource | Role | Permissions |
---|---|---|
Topic | Editor | Create topic Describe Topic Read/Write topic Edit/Read topic config Empty/Delete topic |
Topic | Viewer | Read topic Read topic config Describe topic |
Cluster | Editor | Read ACLs Create ACLs Delete ACLs Edit registry compatibility |
Cluster | Viewer | Read ACLs |
Subject | Editor | Read subjects Edit subjects Delete subjects Edit subject compatibility |
Subject | Viewer | Read subjects |
Consumer Group | Editor | Read consumer groups Edit consumer groups Describe consumer groups |
Consumer Group | Viewer | Read consumer groups Describe consume groups |
Connector | Editor | Read connectors Edit connectors View connector config Manage tasks |
Connector | Viewer | Read connectors View connector config |
Overlapping Role Assignments
If you have overlapping role assignments, your permissions set will be the union of those role assignments. This is because RBAC operates as an additive model.
For example, if you had Editor role with permissions to edit, read and describe on consumer groups, and Viewer role with only read and describe permissions, your complete permissions set would include the superset (i.e. edit, read and describe).