All About Cedar, an Open Source Solution for Fine-Tuning Kubernetes Authorization

The New Stack Podcast

Kubernetes has relied on role-based access control (RBAC) since 2017, but its simplicity limits what developers can express, said Micah Hausler, principal engineer at AWS, on The New Stack Makers. RBAC only allows actions; it can’t enforce conditions, denials, or attribute-based rules. Seeking a more expressive authorization model for Kubernetes, Hausler explored Cedar, an authorization engine and policy language created at AWS in 2022 and later open-sourced. Although not designed specifically for Kubernetes, Cedar proved capable of modeling its authorization needs in a concise, readable way. Hausler highlighted Cedar’s clarity—nontechnical users can often understand policies at a glance—as well as its schema validation, autocomplete support, and formal verification, which ensures policies are correct and produce only allow or deny outcomes.

Now onboarding to the CNCF sandbox, Cedar is used by companies like Cloudflare and MongoDB and offers language-agnostic tooling, including a Go implementation donated by StrongDM. The project is actively seeking contributors, especially to expand bindings for languages like TypeScript, JavaScript, and Python.

Learn more from The New Stack about Cedar:

Ceph: 20 Years of Cutting-Edge Storage at the Edge

The Cedar Programming Language: Authorization Simplified

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